Loco stretched his arms above his head. “Fucking finally. I thought that the members of this new generation of androids were supposed to be, you know, super advanced, and super smart, but fucking pretty boy can’t seem to take a hint. Or even understand words, for that matter. I thought ‘fuck off’ was pretty clear, myself, but I might be prejudiced…”
Olofi shook his head. “Oh, leave the poor boy alone. He didn’t do anything wrong. We might as well have ended this conversation as soon as he walked in. I feel like we’re just talking in circles at this point.”
Loco nodded sagely. “So we’re agreed. We don’t need Legba, and he’s a useless pile of garbage who’s just taking up unnecessary space and weight in our ship, and we should toss him out of an airlock at the next opportunity.”
Olofi put a hand to his forehead. “I— No. I certainly do not think that we’ve come to that conclusion. I just mean that we’re not making any progress in this conversation. I think that at this point we’re basically just restating the same positions, over and over again. You don’t think that we need Legba—”
Loco leaned back in his seat, nodding. “That’s right. Because we don’t. In all of the time he’s spent on the Chesed, he’s only shown an interest in Bentley, and even that has just been an interest in couple’s meditation, in closed, locked rooms, completely shut away from the rest of us. And the guy hasn’t even bothered to come up with an explanation, or even an excuse.”
Olofi leaned forward in his seat. “I don’t disagree with any of the facts you’ve stated—”
Loco leaned in, his face getting closer to Olofi’s. “So then why do you trust him? He hasn’t given us any reason to. I don’t think we even really know what his end game is with this mission, or what he’s trying to get out of it. He didn’t seem too hot on the salvation and liberty of all conscious life forms when we pitched it to him, so I doubt very much that that is what’s motivating him.”
Shango nodded. “Loco continues to make a good point. You can never really trust someone if you do not know what drives them.”
Olofi slouched, sighing. “I know. Again, I can’t say that I know his motives, or what’s driving him. But one thing I do know is that Bentley trusts him. And shouldn’t that be enough for us to extend that same level of trust?”
Shango twisted his mouth, a look of uncertainty spreading across his face. “I’m afraid that is not enough for me. That is not enough to—”
Shango was interrupted by the sound of the door to the bridge sliding open. Jade strode into the room, her pace quick and purposeful, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her hands coated in a dark grease. A grave expression was fixed upon her face.
She approached the table. “I have some good news, and I have some bad news.”
Loco leaned forward, clapping his hands together. “Oh, oh, let me guess, let me guess… The good news is that you’ve discovered that grease is an excellent substitute for hand moisturizer… And the bad news is… You used up all the grease, didn’t you?”
Jade pulled a cloth from one of her pockets, and began to wipe her hands. “The good news is that I’ve found the source of the problems I had been noticing with the hyperdrive.”
Olofi smiled. “That’s great!”
Loco elbowed him in the side. “Don’t get too excited. You do remember that there’s bad news, too, right?”
Jade took a deep breath. “The bad news is that the problem was caused by a leak.”
Shango’s eyes narrowed. “A leak in what?”
Jade put the cloth back in her pocket. “There was a wide gash in one of the hoses that feeds fuel to the hyperdrive.”
Loco shook his head disapprovingly. “Sounds like our head engineer has failed in her duties. The costs for the repairs are going to come out of your paycheck, you know.”
Jade looked at him blankly. “You do realize that you’ve never paid me, right?”
Loco crossed his arms. “With this kind of shoddy work, are you surprised?”
Jade sighed and turned towards Shango and Olofi. “I’m not sure what caused this leak, but I can assure you, this wasn’t corrosion, or a failure of maintenance. This was something else.”
Olofi tapped his fingers on the top of the table, thinking. “Okay. So in practice, what does this mean for us?”
Jade clasped her hands together. “Well, apart from needing to replace the hose with the gash in it, the main issue is that we’re almost out of FTL fuel. The affected section of hose was in a part of the ship that is not fully atmospherically controlled, and because of the gash, an incredible amount of suction was created, drawing fuel out of the tanks, and out through the rupture. By the time I isolated the hose, most of our FTL fuel had been sucked out into space.”
Olofi nodded, an expression of concern creeping across his face. “Which means we definitely won’t be able to make it to the Dracon System without stopping to refuel?”
Jade shook her head. “Definitely not. We can try to get there without the hyperdrive, but that would mean a trip that takes somewhere in the ballpark of a century. And I don’t know about you guys, but I doubt that I’m gonna live quite that long.”
Loco shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t mind burning a century, if it means that we get to take the scenic route.”
Shango sighed. “Well, I do mind. It looks like we’re going to have to make a stop.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bentley’s home planet, Dacca Noir, Dracon System, Kaunox Sector
Legba dabbed at the edges of his mouth with a finely woven linen napkin, then set the square of cloth down on the table before him. He was sitting alone, and the table was covered with an array of delicately crafted dinnerware, yet every single plate and bowl was empty. They barely showed a trace of the expensive gourmet food that they had borne until very recently.
Legba looked over the collection of flatware and smiled to himself. It is the mark of a truly fine meal when you don’t just eat it in its entirety, but when you also almost lick the plates clean, he thought to himself. In fact, I’ve done such a good job of cleaning these plates, it’s almost a wonder that I had to pay a small fortune for the opportunity, when there are people in the back who are being paid good money for their cleaning services. Although, to be fair, I suppose they do use soap, rather than their tongues...
A waitress dressed in a pristine white suit approached Legba, her hands clasped behind her back. She surveyed the empty plates on Legba’s table and nodded. “I take it you don’t want to send any of this back?”
Legba smiled. “No, it was all excellent.”
The waitress smiled back. “Anything else that I can get for you?”
Legba shook his head lightly. “Oh, no, thank you very much. Just the bill, please.”
As the waitress drew a small transparent rectangle from one of her pockets, Legba let his gaze drift away from the table, out the wide floor-to-ceiling window which sat a couple of feet to his left. From his seat on the sixtieth floor, he had an excellent view of the city’s expansive skyline. The sun had just set, leaving a gradient of orange and blue floating at the horizon, but the city’s multitude of skyscrapers were lit up for the night, creating a delightful, gigantic pattern of multicolored points of light.
The waitress handed the transparent rectangle to Legba. He barely looked at the figures that made up the bill, instead glancing to the top right of his field of vision. Though his corteX, he withdrew a few thousand credits, paying for his meal and leaving a substantial tip.
The transparent rectangle began to glow a soft shade of green. The waitress took it back and smiled. “Have a lovely evening, sir.”
Legba nodded to her. “You too. And don’t spend that tip all at the same time. Unless you’re buying real estate.”
The waitress glanced down at the rectangle, and her jaw dropped. She looked back at Legba, an exaggerated, giddy grin on her face. “Th— Thank you! Thank you so much!”
Legba watched her leave the table, almost skipping as s
he went. He pushed his chair back and stood up, shaking his head. I don’t think I will ever quite understand the relationship that humans have with money, he thought to himself. It was easy to forget when he was alone on the dead rock, but these last few days on Dacca Noir had been a stark reminder of how money seemed to structure almost every aspect of human life. Based on the numbers in certain accounts, some people got to sit in this room, spending vast sums of money on a third of their daily caloric intake. On the other hand, different numbers in different accounts meant that others had to spend over half of their day standing just a room away, toiling in misery. What one person spent on dinner for a night was what another required to cover housing for a year.
Yet these numbers seemed so arbitrary, and so silly. The previous day, he had strolled through a fancy, elaborately decorated casino, watching people hurl cubes and dodecahedra across broad tables covered in green felt. The people watched these prisms with an almost incomprehensible intensity, as though a seven would bring them salvation, and a two or a twelve eternal damnation. In some sense, their intensity bore some semblance of rationality. Legba had seen a few situations where the tumble of a set of dice literally made the difference between prodigious wealth that might last for generations, and immediate, abject poverty. Surprise surprise, abject poverty seemed to be in the cards for pretty much everyone, with the exception of the house.
As Legba walked out of the restaurant, towards a nearby bank of elevators, he gazed idly at the dozens of obscenely wealthy patrons of the dining establishment. They all seemed so proud to be there, to have the wealth necessary to enter this room. Legba shook his head dismissively. As a tech mage, Legba could easily and instantaneously fill any account with credit. Here on Dacca Noir, that meant that he could have absolutely anything he wanted, whenever he wanted it. It’s not as though he had particularly refined tastes, but the ease that came with wealth felt bizarre. He felt comfortable enough on his dead rock, and it felt odd that if he wanted to recapture that lifestyle here on Dacca Noir, he could easily pay people to tend his fire and prepare his meals. There was something almost indecent in knowing that if he wanted, he wouldn’t even need to bring his spoon to his own mouth…
As if on cue, an attendant a few yards away pressed the button to summon an elevator, so that he might save Legba the extra five seconds it would take to walk to the elevator bank. To the attendant’s credit, the elevator arrived so promptly that Legba didn’t even need to change his gait, walking straight into the waiting chamber without needing to pause. He nodded to the attendant as the doors closed, running a facial recognition program through his corteX. Legba pressed the button for the ground floor, and over the course of his short trip to the planet’s surface, he found the attendant’s identity, as well as the attendant’s main banking account. As the doors slid open, Legba walked out, through the atrium, and added a substantial gratuity to the attendant’s account for his services. There, Legba thought. Now the kid can buy his own elevator, if he wants.
As Legba strode through the building’s automatic doors, onto the sidewalk, it occurred to him that there was another account he should move some money into. Although it had been a few days since Legba had seen Loco in the bar in the port’s visitor complex, Loco’s tab remained open. Legba whistled involuntarily, impressed. Loco has many deficiencies, Legba thought, but he does have an admirable devotion to the causes that he believes in. Such as drinking himself stupid for days on end. Legba smiled, moving a couple thousand credits onto the tab. That should keep his creditors – and Shango, and Olofi – at bay for a while longer.
Legba ambled along the wide sidewalk, wending his way down a major downtown avenue. By now, the sun had completely set, and the sky was an inky veil of black, but the street was so well lit and active that it might as well have been the middle of the day. Holograms projected from shop windows, boasting their wares, sales, and celebrity endorsements, while throngs of locals and tourists alike crowded the pavement. Legba weaved through the droves of people, a singular purpose in mind, but he still enjoyed the feeling of being surrounded by so much life and vitality. It almost gives one pause about living on an isolated, uninhabited fragment of rock, he thought to himself.
As he made his way farther and farther north, the crowds began to thin, and the street started to change. The fancy shops and restaurants with their inviting holograms were replaced by closed doors and windows, which gave little indication as to what lay behind them. The well-maintained, well-illuminated sidewalks were replaced by eroding patches of concrete, lit only intermittently by occasional pools of light. However, the rougher things started to look, the happier Legba became. This walk was becoming familiar, and as the street became more worn down, he knew that he was getting ever closer to his destination.
As he passed through one of the momentary patches of darkness, between two pools of light, Legba made a decided shift in his appearance. While on Dacca Noir, he had been employing a tech-based perception filter, to better suit his environment. To enter the restaurant that afternoon, he had tweaked the filter so that anyone looking at him would see a man in a tasteful, well-tailored suit. It wasn’t really his style, but to get a table, he knew that he needed to present himself in a way that diverged sharply from the more monastic garb he favored on the dead rock.
However, as he made his way farther north, the outfit that made him look like a typical product of intergenerational wealth now made him stick out like a sore, exceptionally bejeweled thumb. A brief glance at his corteX replaced the blazer with a heavy, stained, worn-out overcoat and the leather dress shoes with bulky, crumbling boots. No one was watching him, but if they had been, they would have seen a wealthy man leave one pool of light and a pauper enter the next.
Soon, all traces of commercial buildings had disappeared, and Legba was walking through a dense array of apartment complexes. After crossing one last street, Legba slowed his pace and leaned against an apartment building. He yawned, throwing his hands upwards. Although he was tired, this gesture was mostly for the sake of tossing a bug into the air: a tiny, almost invisible device of his own invention, which could capture and stream both visuals and audio to his corteX. The bug floated upwards, towards one of the balconies that jutted out of the building. Legba leaned up against the building, his back to the street, and closed his eyes, piloting the bug. Ah, he thought to himself. Right on schedule.
The bug showed Legba a live feed of a young woman, who stood on her balcony, looking up at the sky. It was the woman he had seen days prior, in his Space Cave, and a woman he’d seen each day since he’d arrived on Dacca Noir: Raven Black. This seemed to be a nightly ritual for her. As soon as she returned home from work, she would stand on her balcony, and stare up at the stars.
The last few days had allowed Legba to fill in the gaps in Raven Black’s life that occurred between these jaunts of amateur astronomy. He had gleaned her home address and place of work from her Imperial records, and he had followed her, using his bugs to get a set of eyes in the same room as her whenever he so chose. She lived alone in this apartment complex, and although it was not in the best neighborhood the city had to offer, Raven Black’s living situation didn’t seem to come from a lack of money. She had a demanding, full-time job, running the security systems of Dacca Noir’s government stations.
Legba had not been blind to the irony of tailing a security expert for a few days, and although the woman never had a clue that she was being spied on, he could tell that she was very good at her job. Her position involved a wide variety of skills that lay at the intersection of technology, human systems, and problem solving, and she had excellent command of all of them. Over the course of just a few days, Legba watched her debug security programs, provide advice about how best to secure a perimeter with motion-detecting cameras, and even identify a case of intra-governmental fraud that wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
Raven Black appeared deeply invested in her work, and she seemed to find it satisfying, but once she returned home,
this engaged, highly capable woman dissolved into a person predominately defined by her loneliness. Every night, after she crossed the threshold of her apartment, she was listless and preoccupied, projecting a sense of deep, inconsolable sadness.
Legba had a couple of guesses as to why. Based on her Imperial records, he could tell that her father had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and that her mother had been imprisoned, though there were no records of any trial, and it was unclear what she had been charged with. He had a feeling that if he took the time to check the planet’s prisons for her name, he would find no trace of her. Either of these facts seemed like a sufficient trauma to drive this woman to this state of deep misery. However, even with his invasive mobile camera systems, it was impossible for him to say what exactly was going on in her mind. As Legba watched her staring up at the stars every night, it was as if she were looking for someone who had been absent from her life, hoping that this missing person would suddenly reappear in the sky, and float down to meet Raven Black on her balcony. It was becoming painful to watch.
Although Legba felt as though he had developed a good understanding of this woman and her life, one question remained unanswered: how was she connected to his probability matrix? The main error that he had noticed with the output of his matrix was consistently incorrect predictions of widespread cataclysms. The matrix would predict waves of destruction that were supposed to destroy entire systems, but they never came to pass. Raven Black was sad, but it didn’t seem as if she had any interest in destroying the universe.
As Legba looked out onto the street, he continued to watch Raven Black through his bug, which floated close to her, undetected. The woman sighed, then turned her gaze from the stars back to her home planet. She opened a sliding glass door which led into her apartment, and the bug followed her inside, still invisible to her. It was a small, one-bedroom apartment, sparsely furnished but bordering on cozy. It had been a chilly night, so she took off her jacket and hung it up in her front closet. She stepped into her bedroom and began to take off her work clothes. She unclipped an electronic keycard from her belt and tossed it on top of her dresser.
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