Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  “I missed you,” she breathed close beside his ear. His heart warmed, and she withdrew to an arm’s length, her eyes searching his. “Where have you been all this time?”

  “Where have I been?!” Anger swept away any warmth that might have been there a moment ago. “You were the one who walked out the door!”

  “To go after our son. I went looking for him to explain why we never told him about his father, not because I was planning to leave you for Dorian.”

  “So why did you? You didn’t call, you didn’t text, and you sure as hell didn’t come home. I lived there without you for an entire year before I finally decided to sell up and go,” Alexander said.

  Catalina took a step back and regarded him incredulously. “After the fight we had, can you blame me? You were the one who should have contacted me. When I said I was going to go find Dorian, with or without you, you told me to go! And good riddance. You said all I ever did was hurt you, so I thought, stupid me, that maybe you meant it, and maybe I shouldn’t hurt you anymore.”

  Alexander scowled. “I was angry. You always took Dorian’s side.”

  “Because you were always too hard on him!”

  “I was hard on him, because I didn’t want him to turn into a shitless asshole like his father. Do you know what a shitless asshole is good for? Nada.”

  Catalina blew out a breath and shook her head. “You always had a way with words. I thought you came here to apologize, but no. Same old Alex. Proud as a peacock and nothing to show for it.”

  Alexander frowned. “Don’t put this all on me!”

  “No, you’re right. That isn’t fair. It was both our faults. We spent over ten years waiting to be together. When we should have been newly-weds we became pen pals, and when it was all over we were a pair of strangers, and you were stuck raising someone else’s son. Maybe we could have worked at it and got to know each other again, but instead we gorged ourselves with virtual fulfillment in the Mindscape like everybody else. We had a chance, Alex, but we threw it away. Why do you think I joined the Human League after we separated? The Mindscape ruined us.”

  “You mean you threw it all away,” he said, righteous indignation making him see red.

  “Yes, I cheated, but I apologized, too. I spent years apologizing. I tried to rekindle the romance, to make you feel desired and appreciated, but instead of responding, you pulled even further away and spent even more time in the Mindscape.

  “By the time I went after Dorian, our marriage was an empty husk. You get back what you give, Alex, and after I cheated, you used that as an excuse to never give me anything ever again. So yes, when it came time for one of us to prove to the other that we still cared, of course I wanted you to be the one who came running.”

  Alexander gaped at her, unable to argue or agree. Too many hurts had piled up on both sides for too long. Now those hurts stood between them like a mountain, too high to climb or see past.

  “I guess there’s nothing left to say then,” Alex said in a toneless whisper. He felt numb.

  “I guess not,” Catalina said, and crossed her arms over her chest. “If you didn’t come to apologize, then what did you come for?”

  Alexander stared at her a moment longer, memorizing her beautiful face, imagining for a moment that the mountain wasn’t there between them, that they could wipe the slate clean and start again, a new life, a fresh start… but deep down he knew that was naive.

  “I came to give you this,” he said, producing a small disc-shaped holoreader from his pocket and handing it to her.

  She accepted the reader with a frown and activated it. Divorce papers sprang to life, hovering in the air above her palm, along with a holographic lawyer—a bot.

  “Hello, I am here to assist you with your divorce. Please read each of the issues in the petition carefully and provide a clear verbal response. You may also choose to provide an explanation for each answer you give.”

  Catalina sneered at the bot, no doubt annoyed that she wasn’t dealing with a human instead. She looked back to Alexander. “What is this?”

  “I’m filing for divorce. There aren’t any issues to contest. I’m conceding all of our possessions to you. I put them in storage after I rejoined the Navy. You’ll find the details in the petition. All you have to do is indicate your agreement.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  Alexander glanced up at her mansion and half-smiled. “I guess I don’t. You can leave what you don’t want in storage, and I’ll come back for it someday.”

  “We’ve been separated for years. Why now?”

  “I met someone.”

  “I see…”

  “My XO, Viviana McAdams,” he explained. “We’re serving on the same ship again.”

  A muscle jerked in Catalina’s cheek. She knew all about his history with McAdams. “That’s where you’ve been? In the Navy?”

  He nodded.

  “And she makes you happy?”

  He hesitated before nodding once more.

  Catalina frowned and scanned the divorce petition hovering above her palm. After a moment, she said, “I agree with all issues. File uncontested.”

  “Thank you, Miss de Leon,” the bot lawyer replied. “That will speed the process greatly. There will be a waiting period of 90 days after which you will both receive your final divorce papers. You have my condolences for any pain this may have caused. Remember, divorce is a tragedy, but the greater tragedy is staying in an unhappy marriage.”

  The lawyer bot vanished, and Catalina passed the holoreader back to Alexander. She regarded him with a joyless smile and said, “I’m happy for you both.”

  Alexander detected the lie in that statement, and wondered if he should draw attention to it. “Thank you,” he said instead.

  “Goodbye, Alex.”

  Catalina started to leave, but then something else occurred to him. “Wait—”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s something else… it’s about the war. You’re a senator. I thought you might know something.”

  “I could say the same thing. You’re an admiral of the fleet.”

  “Well, I do know something, but I don’t know who it’s safe to tell. Can you keep a secret?”

  Catalina’s brow furrowed. “I’m a politician. That’s part of the job description. What’s going on, Alex?”

  “Is it… safe out here?” he asked, looking around her front yard.

  “Are you asking me if the trees are bugged?” she replied, amusement warming her voice.

  Alexander dropped his voice to a whisper and said, “President Wallace lied about the Solarians’ involvement in the attacks.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He lied. He doesn’t have proof that they’re the ones who attacked us.”

  Catalina’s eyebrows pinched together. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I was the one who captured and boarded the ship that supposedly attacked us. I didn’t find anything on board to suggest their involvement, and I reported that back to Earth. Right after that we received newscasts from Earth of the president claiming we found undeniable proof of Solarian involvement aboard that ship.”

  Catalina gaped at him. “If that’s true, then you and your crew need to testify. You might be able to prevent a war.”

  “Maybe, or else we’ll be discredited as Solarian spies.”

  “You have a heck of a reputation, Alex. People will trust you.”

  “And what if we meet an unfortunate end and someone buries the story before it breaks?”

  “You think that’s even possible?”

  “You tell me. Why did the president lie? Maybe because the powers that be want this war to happen. Maybe they engineered it.”

  “If that’s true, then you’ll have to go somewhere safe until the story breaks…” Catalina’s eyes drifted away from his and she began nodding. “We’ll win a referendum after a scandal like this.”

  “You’ll what?”

&nbs
p; Catalina’s eyes found his once more. “It’s no secret we’ve been trying to declare our independence from the Alliance, Alex.”

  “What for? So you can start a war with them in fifty years’ time?”

  “No, so that we’ll still be around in fifty years. Bots are going to take over completely, Alex, and when they do, we need to still have enough of our independence left that we can do something about it. It’s survival of the fittest, and they’re so close to being the fittest that it’s terrifying.”

  “They’re not self-aware. When have you ever seen a bot do anything besides what it was programmed to do?”

  “All the time! They rewrite their own code as they learn.”

  “To do a better job. They can’t rewrite the low-level stuff, the rules that keep them from turning against us or harming us.”

  “You can argue all you like, but the writing’s on the wall.”

  “Yeah, I saw plenty of that writing on my way here,” Alexander said, thinking of the rainbow of graffiti he’d seen in the transition zone between the Utopian side of the City of the Minds and the League side.

  “Forget about the politics and hypothetical wars of the future. This war is going to kill billions and everyone knows it. Why do you think they’re all rushing to reserve a tank in one of Mindsoft’s automated habitats? Those habitats might be the only thing left standing when the dust settles.

  “So you have a choice to make: blow the whistle and prevent this war, or keep quiet and prevent the League from separating for a few more years.”

  Alexander sighed. “We don’t know that the Solarians didn’t attack us, only that the proof the president cited doesn’t exist, or didn’t at the time.”

  “Then why lie about it?” Catalina shook her head. “Exposing this is the right thing to do, and you know it. You can’t pretend to convince me that you’re going to ignore that. I know you. Just be careful, okay?”

  Alexander frowned, wondering how Catalina could be so sure of his decision when he wasn’t sure yet himself. “I will.”

  “Good. Now, all this talk of bots reminds me. I have something I’ve been meaning to get rid of. Maybe you can help.”

  “What’s that?”

  Catalina walked by him, heading for the garage at the end of her driveway. “Come see.”

  * * *

  “A bot?” Alexander’s jaw dropped as he stared at the old, beaten-up robot lying in a limp tangle of its own limbs in the back of Catalina’s garage. It looked like a crouching metal spider. He turned to her with a wry smile. “Glass houses indeed.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a Human League senator, preaching to me about the dangers of bots, and you have a metal skeleton in your closet.”

  “It’s not what you think. I caught some kids vandalizing it and chased them away. When I got there, the bot was still active, but immobile. He begged me to help him. He said that if I didn’t he would die. Can you believe that? A bot that’s afraid of dying. Kind of proves my point, don’t you think?”

  “We can program bots to simulate any human characteristics we want. That doesn’t mean anything. His owner must have grown too attached to him and decided to download a human personality.”

  “That’s what I thought. Still, it’s hard to just walk away. Even from a bot.”

  Alexander smiled.

  “What?”

  “You always had a big heart. It’s one of the things I loved about you.”

  “Well, it’s one of the things that’s going to lose me my job if the wrong people find out about this.”

  “I bet. So what do you want me to do about it?”

  “Take him. Fix him, recycle him, I don’t care. I’ll give you the backup he made of himself before he powered down.”

  “You made a backup?”

  “He begged me to let him upload himself to my cloudspace. I couldn’t say no.”

  Alexander laughed.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Well, it’s just that if I didn’t know better, I’d say you actually started to care about it.”

  “You had to be there to understand, but I can’t keep holding on to it.”

  “All right. I’m sure one of the techs back on base will be able to fix him up.”

  Catalina sighed. “Thank you. Do you have something you can download the backup of his data to?”

  “The holoreader, but I doubt it has enough space. You can transfer it from your cloudspace to mine, though.”

  “Good idea…”

  Alexander watched as her gaze drifted out of focus and holograms flickered over her chestnut-brown eyes.

  “I don’t get it…” she said.

  “What?”

  The holograms stopped flickering as she stared at one in particular. “The data isn’t here. He’s gone.”

  Chapter 23

  “You must have erased the backup by accident,” Alexander said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll see what I can recover from his core. If it’s enough to track down his owner, then that’s what I’ll do.” Alexander bent down and lifted the bot with a grunt of effort. “Would you mind calling me a taxi?”

  Catalina shook her head. “I’ll take you myself. Can’t risk a cab driver seeing you around here with that.”

  “All right.”

  A few minutes later they were seated in her hover car with the bot safely hidden in the trunk. Catalina pulled out of the garage and drove down her tree-lined driveway to the gate. It opened automatically for them as she approached, and Catalina drove out onto the street.

  Alexander watched her drive. It was a mostly forgotten skill, but the league was all about people doing for themselves whatever they could, making it a refuge for people who still wanted to work in the real world. For everyone else, virtual jobs and the virtual luxuries they acquired were far better. After all, not everyone can be a millionaire in the real world, but in the Mindscape that was par for the course, and the poor, downtrodden masses propping that system up were all NPCs. Hard to argue with a system that made life better for everyone.

  Catalina skated through a yellow light and narrowly missed hitting a parked car. She was in a big hurry to get rid of the skeleton in her closet. Or maybe it was him that she was in a hurry to get rid of.

  “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you had fighter pilot training,”

  “I’m going to be late for a charity dinner,” she explained.

  “Ah. That explains the dress,” he said, nodding as he admired her shimmering silver gown.

  Silence fell and Alexander looked away to take in the tree-lined streets and mansions flashing by on both sides. “Nice neighborhood.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Does Dorian live around here, too?”

  “Dorian? He’s on the Utopian side of the city. He lives in an apartment around the park.”

  “Nice. How is he, anyway?”

  Catalina glanced his way. “You never went looking for him, either, did you?”

  Alexander frowned. “He’s the one who left…” To not reopen their previous argument, he didn’t add the rest of that thought—just like you.

  Catalina sighed. “People fight for the things that matter to them. Once upon a time you knew how to do that.”

  “Let’s not go there, Caty. I don’t want to fight anymore. And for your information, I did look him up, but I couldn’t find him.”

  “He changed his last name, but you knew he worked at Mindsoft.”

  “Yeah, they said he quit.”

  “He never quit…”

  “Then he told someone to say that in order to keep me away. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. How is he doing?”

  “He’s good. I’m surprised you haven’t seen him on the news.”

  “Why, is he a news anchor?”

  “No, he’s a managing director at Mindsoft and the legal representative for… for the owner. He and Phoenix Gray are quite the team. You should really go see him, Alex. It’s been a long time. I’m sure he’ll want to
see you by now.”

  “So why hasn’t he tried to contact me? I didn’t change my name. Should be easy to find me.”

  Catalina shook her head in dismay. “Pride is the longest distance between two people.”

  “Yours or mine?”

  “Ha ha. I meant for you and Dorian.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll go look him up while I’m still in the city.”

  “Do that. Just don’t forget to apologize.”

  “For what? If I could do it all over again, I’d do it the same way.”

  Catalina shot him a reproving look. “You can honestly say you have no regrets?”

  Alexander studied her through narrowed eyes. “I didn’t say that. I just don’t regret bringing his father to justice.”

  “Just like you don’t regret losing me?” she countered.

  Alexander looked away. It was too late to regret that. What could either of them do about it now? They’d been separated for five years. Add that to the other unresolved issues between them, and it was just too much to overcome. Besides, he was in the Navy again. There was no way they could go back to a life of seeing each other for just a few months each year and pretend like that might work.

  Alexander rode the rest of the way to the Utopian side of the city in silence.

  Catalina pulled into a hover bus stop in a relatively nice part of the city. “You should be able to call a taxi to pick you up here,” she said.

  Alexander nodded. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “You’re welcome. And for what it’s worth, I know you’ll do the right thing, Alex—with Dorian and the Alliance. You might be stubborn and proud, but deep down you’ve got a good heart.”

  Catalina was back to pushing her political agenda, trying to make sure he would testify to the president’s lies. He didn’t like feeling manipulated, but she was right. He would do the right thing. Just as soon as he figured out what that was.

  “Goodbye, Caty.” He climbed out of the car and walked around the back to get the bot out of the trunk. As soon as he shut the trunk, the hover car flew away. Catalina passed a hand out the window and waved.

  Alexander watched her go. She’d signed the divorce papers. He had his closure and an opportunity for a fresh start with McAdams. He should have felt relieved knowing that it was finally over between him and Caty.