by Mike Resnick
“Commander, you must return immediately.”
I started and stared around me at the bone-pale interior of the alien structure. “What is it – is there movement, an energy signature-?”
“Not on the planet, Commander, but long range watch drones have detected another ship entering the system. I have identified it as Allardi’s Chrome Star.”
Pirates. There would always be those more interested in theft than study. Allardi and I had crossed paths more than once, but I decided that this must be the last time. Moments later I was scrambling out of the alien relic’s presence, bounding back to my ship. We had spotted Allardi. Had Allardi spotted us? Almost certainly. We needed to meet him in space, not slow and cumbersome within the planet’s gravity well.
I was aware of a new tension within me as I hit the acceleration couch and gave the ship my orders. This would be the real test. Now we would see how things played out.
“Ready all combat systems. Adopt attack plan B,” I instructed. Mere human reflexes were not sufficient to execute the manoeuvres of space combat, but human ingenuity was still a tactical ace in the hole, and I had planned for this encounter long ago. “On my mark, commence.”
I felt the end of the turbulence as we cleared the thin atmosphere with unseemly haste and then the ship the ship the ship the ship the ship the ship the ship the ship the ship the –
The interior of the spaceship shuddered and stopped moving and a string of errors scrolled down the inside of his eyeballs. Malcolm ripped the headset off and came close to throwing it across the apartment in a fit of pique.
“Goddamnit, Stuart!” he shouted at the room. “You were supposed to have fixed this.”
The calm voice of his Home Wizard said, “Do you want me to message Stuart Cochrane?” It was the same voice that the ship’s computer had used, the game borrowing from his home systems for a fuller virtual experience. That was one of the little touches that kept Malcolm working with Stuart, despite the bugs and problems.
“Yes, tell him I have user feedback.” He pushed himself off the experience couch and stomped some feeling back into his feet, which were jabbing him with pins and needles now that he was back in reality. The sensation was unsatisfactory. The body currently housing Malcolm Sellig wasn’t a patch on the virtual frame of Commander Sellig.
“Have the Kitchen Wizard prepare a snack as well,” he added. The couch had kept his body healthy and hydrated, but he always came out of a game session with a terrible case of the munchies.
“Hey, Mal!” Stuart Cochrane’s cheery voice came to him. Malcolm’s Communications Wizard stimulated his visual cortex so that he saw an image of the thin, angular man before him, working with the information Cochrane’s system was sending over.
“Hey, Stu. Look, I’ve been playtesting FerMMO again –”
“It’s great, isn’t it,” Stuart chimed in with his trademark enthusiasm for his project du jour.
“Yeah, look, it really is, good work man, but it crashes when you fight the pirates still. I reported that last time, and it still isn’t fixed.”
“Ah, crap.” Stuart’s image rubbed the back of its neck. “Man, I fixed that. It was working fine. It’s a really good sequence… Have you changed your system specs?”
“Nothing,” Malcolm told him. “You sure you actually fixed it, and didn’t, I don’t know, dream doing that?”
“It’s on the log as fixed,” Stu said. “Means I must have looked at it. If you don’t trust me, trust the system, right? But something hasn’t taken, obviously. Look, man, I’ll make this a priority, okay? Very next thing that gets looked at.”
“Great.” Sensing that his friend might take all this a bit hard, Malcolm added, “But it’s good, the rest of it, really goodSuch a real experience.”
“That’s what we’re about, man,” Stu agreed, grinning.
“I’m really looking forward to when we crack the anomaly, find out what’s inside. We get to meet the builders, right?”
Stuart’s eyebrows went up. “Hell no, man. That’s the mystery. It’s alien. Humans can’t process what’s in there, right?”
“But… You know what’s in there, yes?” Malcolm frowned. “There’s a, what, a logic, right?”
“Man, it doesn’t need one. It just needs to be weird and alien and make you wonder.”
“But…” Malcolm thought back over the four or five planets he’d explored in the game. “When do we get to see the actual aliens? Any aliens?”
“Man, you know why it’s called FerMMO, right? The whole paradox thing? Humanity gets out in the galaxy, but where are all the aliens, yeah?”
“Look, I understand that,” Malcolm put in quickly. “But surely you’ve scotched that already with us finding ruins and, you know, any trace at all. There isn’t a Fermi paradox, because there definitively were aliens even if there aren’t now. So, look, if you have that in FerMMO, then surely you can let us actually meet some, maybe way later on, but still… or it’s going to be a bit of a let down after a while.”
Stuart steepled his fingers. “Are you submitting that as formal feedback?”
“Er…” Malcolm was slightly thrown by the phrasing. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
“I think that falls outside my parameters. I’ll submit that to Mr Cochrane and he will have to decide whether to change his instructions to the Game Design Wizard.”
“…” Malcolm just stood there staring at him for a moment, making a noise in his throat that didn’t quite resolve into words, until he blurted out, “I thought I was talking to Stuart.”
“You are speaking to Mr Cochrane’s Social Interaction Wizard,” the image of Mr Cochrane informed him. “Mr Cochrane has been playtesting FerMMO for the last two weeks.”
“Two weeks, ah…” Malcolm tried to remember how many times he had spoken to Stuart recently: quite a few. In fact, now he thought about it, he had found the man considerably more congenial than usual.
“Ah, well, yes, let him know. Tell him he can call me to talk about it if he wants… I’ll leave some opinions with my own system if I’m, you know, occupied.”
“Of course,” said Stuart Cochrane’s Social Interaction Wizard. “Did you have any other feedback?”
“No, er,” Malcolm felt weirdly thrown, as though real life had cast up a string of error reports itself. “Just tell him, er, good work, man. It’s really good.”
“Thank you.” The image’s answering smile was so spontaneous and genuine that Malcolm wondered how he could ever have mistaken it for the real man.
After the call had ended, he looked about his apartment. He wanted to go back to FerMMO, but Stuart’s Games Designer Wizard would be a good few hours sorting out its current batch of bugs. Perhaps something old school, Dragonhack or Stealthrunner… The couch beckoned, with all its myriad possibilities.
But the conversation with Stuart – or not with Stuart – had unsettled him, as though the ground he was standing on had proved unexpectedly brittle, about to give at any time. He wondered idly when he had actually last spoken to the man, the real man. Or anyone, actually. The games were theoretically all multiplayer, but the technology had advanced sufficiently that telling a player from a computer-run character was essentially impossible.
Discomforted, he went over to the window and lifted the blinds for the first time in what felt like an age. In his mind was the dead alien world with its impenetrable mysteries – impenetrable precisely because there was no mystery, just a set of tantalizing clues without a centre, designed to inspire awe without ever explaining themselves. Didn’t there used to be real mysteries…?
He peered out of the window at the night above, but the sky was hung with so many blinking, blazing adverts and messages and animated images that he could no longer see the moon, let alone the stars.
In The Beginning
Gerry Webb
The beautiful patio garden exploded as a hail of bullets stormed in. Alex dived and rolled towards the French windows. Far too late. What saved
him was the active glassite sunscreen he had put up only yesterday to help him work in the middle of the day when the suns reached full intensity. Meanwhile, statues, potted rare plants, wall mosaics, the lunch plates and glasses being carefully laid out by his butler Chivers and (bloody hell!), Chivers himself, erupted and jerked under the merciless volley of lead. Alex rolled through the drapes into the lounge and kept down until he reached his desk. Then he cautiously stood and hit the alert to his security section. He needed a few minutes to think and to catch his breath before his personal security arrived – he was getting a bit old for this sort of thing. He could do without the local guards crashing into the apartment so he left the general alarm well alone. There was clearly nothing anyone could do for Chivers anyway.
Alex was tall, still in good condition, and his fortuitous gene mixture had served him well, but flecks of grey were creeping into his hair and moustache. He stood quietly by his desk, looking at the beams of sunlight which found their way in through gaps in the heavy curtains to the patio, ten metres away.
First consideration: the neighbours. None of them would panic, of course. The families were a tightknit group and everyone in the senior citizens’ complex was, by definition, experienced in such matters. The real trouble was that this was the first breach of security the new space colony, the Shepherd, had experienced, and it came disturbingly early. The cylindrical hull of the habitat had not even been completely populated yet.
Hardly surprising considering the vastness of the Shepherd. It was one of the largest (Cleaver) class of space colony and at the very limit of ‘sensible engineering’, well in excess of the Rama class. The six metre thick 20km diameter maraging steel hull allowed a standard Earth gravity for just under a third of a revolution per minute. A hull length of 100km allowed very generous estates for the 250,000 population on the inside of the cylinder even after the specified lighting, landscaping and services had been installed complete with hills, valleys, rivers and trees. The 10m of regolith that the Albion families specified for their comfort had been laid ten year ago and some of the estates were beginning to look impressive, up to the usual standard.
Even so, Alex and the other pensioners liked to keep apartments at the 85% gravity level in the terraces on the hemispherical ends of the cylindrical habitat so that cascades of gardens, waterfalls and views along the cylinder could be arranged. The shots must have been well-silenced and must have come from one of the places on the hemisphere where engineering work was still going on. The idea that any of his neighbours would harbour an assassin, even accidentally, was unthinkable, but he knew his security would cover everything anyway.
Second, his partner and the family. Clearly, communication of any kind to anyone at all should be considered insecure until the situation was clarified. He simply had to wait until his team had swept the apartment for any bugs. Luckily, his beloved partner of more than sixty years was 20km away, establishing their estate. He missed her badly and hoped everything was okay. Security would be reaching her soon in any case. Similarly, his known mistresses past and present would be discreetly informed and protected.
But what about poor Chivers? His ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ had been willed to him by his father as part of his estate some years ago now. He had become far more important than a simple body slave, and had become a companion, secretary and honest advisor. He looked around. The sound of the fountains on the patio only emphasised the quietness,. Empty shelves, niches and display cases stared back. Who was going to unpack and lay out his collections now? Over the years Chivers had become as great an aficionado, if not greater, of the collectables as Alex himself. The treasures fell into three very different groups.
For himself, Alex collected literature, technical works and objects from the pioneering era of the space age, over 400 years ago. The pride of his collection was a DeHavilland Spectre rocket engine, already in its display case nearby. From it, both he and Chivers had derived their ultimate satisfaction – the envy and chagrin of fellow collectors. What else was collecting for? He was negotiating on the ultimate prize, a Reaction Engine’s Sabre MK 1, although he couldn’t imagine where they were going to put it. Perhaps he should found a museum? No. Perhaps in his will. This collection was definitely for himself.
For his partner there were the objects of fine art, enabling her to extract similar envy from friends and neighbours.
While he much appreciated the pleasure to be drawn from such popularly appreciated collectables, he was not drawn to them with any obsession and regarded them more as investments. He did, however, gain some satisfaction from the objects that originated on Earth even if they were comparatively dowdy compared with these from off-Earth artists.
These two collections, while interesting to those of similar tastes, were not definitive in any way. The third one was. With it, Alex could show off the reasons for the vast resources of the Albion Alliance: their mineral wealth. His mineral collection was second to none and his personal skill and management in directing the intelligent prospecting probes in their long trips around the outer solar system had established his seniority in the key councils and organisations of the colony. Foresight, skill, and choosing the correct business specialisations in the rush into the solar system in the early 22nd century had enabled the Albions to become, by the early 25th, one of the two dozen or so groups rich enough to afford the Cleaver class habitats. The gigantic hulls were built by Bond Engineering in their asteroid belt main complex, then moved anti-sunwards out of the belt to be fitted out to the bespoke orders of their wealthy owners. The Shepherd was the fourth for the Albion alliance and had begun its fitting out 10 years ago. As this neared completion, an order for the 5th, the Gatland, was already being placed. The Albions were, literally, astronomically rich.
Alex’s collection was spread throughout the various boardrooms and meeting places of the alliance but he kept some of the most beautiful to decorate his personal quarters. Rare and exotic crystals, sectioned and polished rocks, unusual ores, the mineral wealth of the solar system in its uncountable variety waited in cases in the storerooms for him and Chivers to unpack. Chivers! Pull yourself together and think. Behave as befits your patrician status. He took a deep breath.
The big questions for security were: How? Who? And why?
Clearly, the patio had presented the only opportunity for a hit as all of the apartments in the complex had entrances which opened into a maze of corridors, buried in the inner hull, complete with all sorts of security devices. The private gardens, patios, balconies and windows of the complex faced down the length of the colony, to catch the view and the light. There were observation decks, bars, restaurants, libraries and other communal facilities under the stars on the outer hull, but entry there would be even more difficult than from the inward side. His thoughts were interrupted by the house intelligence in its contralto female voice. “There are personages outside entrance 3, sir. Considering their rudeness in advancing before being cleared, I can only assume they are your security team.” Keeping well away from the drapes to the patio, he went through the second hull-side exit of the lounge, down 50m of hall and into a generously proportioned real-wood panelled entrance lobby. The viewers showed six personages outside – three of them human, two of whom were women. At his command, the door opened.
“Hi, Frank, why the fuck is one of your team wearing a dinner jacket? It’s lunch time!”
“That’s Jim. He’s part of my personal team, but he was on temporary loan to the entertainment club on D deck. They were having trouble with some of the fitters and needed a good bouncer. I’ve brought him to look after you.”
“Okay. I guess he can wear some of poor Chivers’ gear. I’ll show you where it is, Jim, as soon as I can move around my own bloody apartment.”
While the two women with their specialised robot detectives moved briskly past to examine the scene, Jim bowed curtly, his artificial lines showing a little.
It was against Albion family law to build artificial beings
that were undetectable. The words TIN! MAN! Across his knuckles helped. “Thank you, Sir. I am pleased to meet you.”
Frank disappeared into the apartment with the rest of the team. Jim hovered, trying to look discrete while his sensors scanned for any anomalies.
A short while later Frank called them into the lounge, declaring it clear, and presented a summary of the situation. Despite looking like a younger version of Alex, he was not a clone (they were often used in security). He was, in fact, a grand-nephew: the Octavion to Alex’s Julius Caesar. “We don’t know who or why yet, but no other suspicious activity seems to have taken place over the whole of the Shepherd and none of the other counsellors or division heads have experienced any trouble. I would guess this may be personal or related specifically to our division’s prospecting activities. You haven’t annoyed any husbands lately? Don’t worry though, the whole security division won’t rest until we fully understand what went wrong and seal the gaps. We are at our most vulnerable right now, during fitting out. The assassins chose a very narrow window of opportunity to smuggle in whatever or whoever was needed.
“One thing we do know is that this wasn’t a live shot but a rather elaborate booby-trap. We found traces of a remotely-triggered weapon at the edge of apartment complex, in a control room that’s being readied for when the propulsion units are fitted. The weapon appears to have self-destructed immediately after the attack, presumably to cover the perpetrators’ tracks. Our people are still trying to recover some identifiable bits.
“The trap was elaborate, tripped by that prize mutant gardenia you had delivered a couple of days ago. Its DNA is programmed to respond to your DNA when you sniffed it, triggering the remote gun to spray the dining area with bullets. You were set up by your own favourite flower.”
“Bugger me,” said Alex.
“Yes, they very nearly did. If you hadn’t wandered off behind that screen, your bits would have been all over the patio with Chivers’.”
