Amy and the Star Ranger

by Laer Carroll

  There were plenty. It was a rich and complex environment, or hundreds of types of environments. But in the end "trouble-shooter" seemed to suit her best.

  She buckled down to studying the Confed.

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  Amy looked up when Anna appeared as quickly as she'd disappeared.

  "Hello, Amelia. Studying the Confed, I see."

  "Anna. Very interesting. Have you finished your preparations for traveling?"

  "The urgent ones. Some I can handle in flight. Would you like to eat?"

  Amy focused inward. Her stomach agreed it was time to eat. She said Yes.

  Anna called up a glass-topped dining table with silvery legs and matching chairs on two opposite sides. She sat down in one and Amy got up to take the other.

  "What is your favorite dish?" the alien said.

  "I have many. Here is one." A thought and Orb delivered a plate before Amy filled with a salmon and rice dish. She called up a glass of iced tea beside its side, then spoons and forks and a napkin and a bowl of sugar.

  "I'll give it a try," Anna said. An identical gustatory array appeared before her. They set to eating.

  The taste of the tea was merely adequate, but Amy had never been a connoisseur of tea. But the first mouthful of fish and rice was heavenly, spiced exactly right with a subtle sauce. Her jaws locked up for a moment.

  They ate silently for most of the meal. Toward the end Anna said, "Your Mr. Noonan has reached Earth and begun to establish himself. I've ceased to monitor him as he's getting on well."

  "Thank you for telling me."

  The woman finished a last bite, moved her chair a bit backward, and crossed one knee over the other.

  "How are your studies going?"

  Amy thought the woman probably knew; she had "seen" that Amy was studying the Confed when all that activity was invisible and silent, in Amy's head. But maybe not. In any case, it was polite to act as if her question was genuine.

  "I feel comfortable in what I've learned about what's happened at home since I--died. And I'm beginning to feel comfortable with my Confederation studies. At the very least I've concluded, after looking at many of the alternatives, that I want to become, as you call it, a trouble shooter."

  Anna nodded. "Good. I noticed when I called you a VIP that you were skeptical. Let me explain.

  "The Confederation is a genuine Paradise. Everyone is perfectly healthy, so wealthy that poverty is an abstract concept to them, and as sane as it's possible to be. Our genes have been cleaned of insanity and the worst neurotic tendencies.

  "You might think that everyone would descend into sloth. But the genes for boredom and the need for challenge have not been eradicated. People work and strive because they want to.

  "But they strive mostly within the Confed. People who gladly work in the Associated shell are few. Those who work in the Protected shell are even fewer. So we recruit more from the Associates, and a lot more from the Protecteds. People like you. That is what makes you a VIP."

  She shifted position, called a glass of white wine into being, and sipped.

  "I am a super VIP, a rare Core person who wanted challenge and danger and found it. I survived to four centuries because I'm good and, frankly, lucky. I am a Ranger with responsibility for an entire Zone of the Confed periphery. Yet I came here to meet with you. To make sure that the machines' reports on you were true. They reported that you had what it takes to become a Ranger like myself. And you do."

  Amy's bullshit detector was good, but she could not detect any bullshit here. Maybe the flattery was just too well hidden, but she was willing to take the chance she was hearing the truth.

  Or maybe she was fooling herself because she'd been offered her heart's desire.

  She'd never sought fame. Or the money which could come with it, as nice as that was. She'd not cared about being The First Woman Who, or The First ANYONE Who. She'd just seen "impossible" challenges and something inside her said Oh, Yeah?!

  So now she had a chance to become The First EARTHLING Who. But becoming the First was unimportant. What was seductive about this job offer were the challenges she would face. And the need to stretch herself to meet those challenges.

  "You said I'd be given my own spacecraft."

  Anna smiled. Amy knew Anna knew she had her fish hooked. She didn't care. This fish wanted to be hooked.

  "This is what it will look like."

  Amy was floating--sitting--in blackness. All around were stars upon stars and faint colored nebulae about many of the stars. What drew her eyes was a craft floating in the emptiness before her.

  It was a white finless dart almost a football field in length, streamlined against what forces she'd yet to learn, with not a single feature to break its surface. Inside it, Orb let her know so discreetly Amy barely noticed its intrusion, were forces and engines which could drive it among the stars at many times the speed of light.

  So too inside were engines which could destroy an entire armada of spaceships, or turn an asteroid or a city or an army to dust. But only if her cunning was unable to otherwise correct or prevent some horrible wrong.

  "So how do I become a Ranger? Go through basic training? A police academy?"

  "Every Guardian is unique, so your education will be unique. It will be mostly self-designed and administered. We send you where there are problems and you learn by doing. You will succeed with some problems, make mistakes with others, perhaps tragic ones. You will learn to recover from your failures. You must, because even the best of us fail.

  "You start off with several advantages. We chose a mature person not given to childish emotions, though you're not immune to them. You're good at creative, intuitive thinking as well as critical, logical thinking. You like to learn, which is necessary as the problems you'll face will be complex and unusual, at least at first.

  "You've always been healthy and before we woke you up we made it impossible for you to get sick...."

  "What? You tampered with--"

  "Yes."

  Amy eyed Anna, who looked patiently back at her.

  The idea of doctors looking at and poking her naked body made literal chills rise on the outsides of her arms and legs. She took a sip of her wine to give her time for the chills and the almost-raped feeling to fade and almost but not totally die away.

  "OK. Go on."

  "We also gave you the cure for aging, as I told you and Fred earlier. You'll always be young. You've also been given a skin that will protect you from most dangers. No gun, no laser projector, not even massive explosions can harm you."

  Amy looked down at her arms and hands. She saw no cellophane or its like. She flexed a hand, bent an arm. No sensations betrayed the invisible skin's existence.

  "A caution. If the impact of bullets or explosions throw you against something that CAN harm you. Even then, you have been given toughening to help you survive that. Still, it's not a good idea to let yourself be shot."

  Amy smiled at the feeble joke. She sobered at the thought that to "toughen" her they must have worked on her body while she was asleep and defenseless.

  "Your body and to a lesser extent your mind has been enhanced in other ways. All this brings you up to even with other Confed citizens. Of which you are now one. You need never fear being looked down upon when meeting others of us.

  "One of the augmentations that citizens have is a machine that resides in your brain. It lets you communicate with many devices including like machines in other citizens. It offers a limited form of telepathy.

  "More important is that it communicates with many other types of machines. Your spaceship is one kind. Computers are another kind. In the future of your planet, and the past on advanced planets, a vast amount of information will reside, or resides, in computers. You have a research library in which you can find much information in an instant.

  "Like all tools, this instant access has disadvantages as well as advantages. On primitive planets you have to research physical libraries. The more primitive have no libra
ries, which can leave one feeling helpless if they've never developed the skills to find out information without machine assistance."

  "Well, that won't bother me. I got very good at research in college."

  Anna smiled. "You think so now. Wait a few years, or decades. You might change your mind about your skills then."

  "Hmm."

  "Your machine also has vast mathematical skills. You will learn how to give it problems to solve that would baffle all your mathematicians and all their computers.

  "Couple that with the true sciences of psychology and sociology and economics the Confed has developed you could predict how elections and stock markets will behave. How societies will evolve. You could become the absolute master of a primitive world, or of a world like your own."

  "What a temptation you hand me!"

  Anna gave another of those annoying knowing smiles.

  "Not for you. We would never have selected you for this job if you cared about power or popularity or control of other people. Remember, we have an EXACT science of psychology."

  Amy grunted, annoyed that she was thought so predictable. It tempted her to act the opposite of their assessment...

  The idea of what she'd have to do to become an empress of some primitive empire, then keep control of it, made her abandon that idea. She'd be so bored within a year that she'd be tempted to jump off some cliff or skyscraper. Which she'd probably survive given all the augmentations she knew of and others the Ranger hadn't yet told her that she'd been given.

  "I'll leave it to you," the woman said, "to discover ALL the tools you have to do your job. What do you say I introduce you to your ship and let you get on your way to your first work assignments?"

  Amy was on her feet in an instant. Her ship!

  Anna rose to her feet and began to retrace Amy and Fred's path from this ship's immense spacecraft hangar.

  As they entered the cavernous space she was suddenly shaken to see that her Electra was gone, replaced by a huge white vessel.

  "Where...?"

  "Oh, it's stored on your ship, dear. One should not throw away such a useful tool. Now, say Hello to your ship."

  The vessel before her had an open door in the side it presented to her. The side was perhaps 50 feet tall, of which only half that rose above the walkway to the spacecraft.

  She stood still, her gaze caressing the egg-shell white perfectly-smooth sides of her ship. She was standing about a third from the front of its over 300 foot length.

  "Ship," said Anna. "This is your new owner. Say Hello."

  "Hello, Amelia Earhart. I am Robocraft 13,112 assigned to you. I accept you as my captain."

  The words had not come through Amy's ears but were projected directly into her inner ear.

  Amy turned toward Anna. "What do I do? Where do I go to my 'assignments'? What are they?"

  "You tell your ship to go to the world on which you are assigned to work. It knows where that is and how to get to it. YOU will decide what your assignments are. There will be many to choose from. And as to how you will accomplish your work, remember that I said you will learn on the job."

  Amy turned back toward the waiting doorway.

  "Kind of scary."

  Anna laughed out loud. "Oh, yes. This just proves we were right to choose you for this job. Only a fool or psychopath would not be scared."

  Amy looked sideways to Anna.

  "Thank you for saving my life, Anna. And for giving me this great gift."

  "Very selfishly, the Confederation needs you. It's a bonus for me that my job lets me set you on your way to doing your job. Go with my blessing, if you want it."

  "I do. Goodbye, Anna. I hope we meet again."

  "In the thousand of years ahead of us, it is almost certain. Goodbye dear Amelia."

  Anna turned and walked away. No handshake or hug from her, something Amy half expected.

  Well, better this way. She herself had never liked prolonged goodbyes.

  Amelia Earhart walked forward into her ship. Somehow she knew the tall doorway closed behind her, the hull of her ship now sealed against forces even those atom bombs she'd read about could not exert.

  "Ship, your name is inconvenient. I will call you Argo."

  "Yes, Amelia. I understand the derivation. A very suitable one. Thank you."

  For a machine it sounded awfully like a human. Amy wondered a little about the information she'd read a few hours ago that said no machines were true "general artificial intellgences" with self-awareness and emotions.

  "Call me Amy, Argo. All my friends do."

  A control room awaited her, she knew somehow. And how to get there.

  As she walked she could feel all around her vast and sophisticated forces coming fully awake. Esoteric eyes, HER eyes, opened onto the spacecraft hangar in which SHE rode. Now it was pushing HER mechanical body in a complex path to and through the door in the side of the moon-sized pearl of Anna's ship.

  In open space HER multiple senses revealed Earth to one side, the Moon to another. SHE sensed many energies beside the visual ones bathing HER, stellar winds and radiations, sleeting microscopic micrometeorites being shrugged off, ghostlike neutrinos trying to penetrated Argo's hull and being shrugged off.

  HER biological body reached the control room and settled into a comfortable seat. Before the body was a wall of view screens.

  HER senses expanded outward and outward, touched the roiling thermonuclear bomb of the sun, Mars and Venus and Mercury.

  AMY sensed further, focused on one planet, ice-ringed Saturn. A star gate awaited HER there.

  SHE went.

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