Titans Page 15

  "Designed? For what possible purpose?" I shook my finger at the corner of the room, destabilizing my body and spinning me across two axes. My brain, meanwhile, spun through dimensions that hadn't been discovered. "For that matter, who? God? Is this going to come down to aliens or time travelers? How many of those do you see around?"

  "Hey, don't all pissy with me! Yell at logic."

  "I had parents. I didn't pop out of a test tube dated One Million, A.D."

  "You think you know everything, don't you?" Fay said. "What if I built something that is to me what I am to Baxter or Tiger? What if it designed and planted you to become what we needed you to be now?"

  I shook my head hard. "I may be a duh-duh human, but if you really needed a walking history book that bad, I can think of a thousand less convoluted ways to get it. Such as sewing legs to a copy of Herodotus."

  "Fine," Fay said with a teary quaver. "I'm just trying to help. If you're going to scream at me, maybe you should go back to Hidey-Hole."

  "Fine." Though I knew the way to the airlock, the box-bot materialized to show me the way. Onboard the shuttle, I fished out my earbud and detached the dot mike from my throat. The spinning gray peanut of Hidey-Hole expanded to fill my window. We landed and I crawled through the umbilicals and airlocks that led inside the asteroid.

  "Want to help referee a game of crashies?" Tiger asked as soon as I emerged into the cavern. I kicked at his striped case. He rolled out of the way. "Oh, do you want to play instead?"

  "Tiger, shut up and leave me alone, will you?"

  He sank back and stopped still, as if my words had not only hurt but killed him. Why do we always take it out on the ones who deserve it least? Some predator's instinct—we know they won't fight back? Frustrated and aimless, I headed for the flat vertical wall some two hundred yards to my right.

  The wall was a disappointment. Gray stone, unnaturally smooth to the touch, sprayed with some transparent sealant. I don't know what I expected: I was trapped inside a floating pebble with several hundred perversely cheerful beings who didn't have the common courtesy of having faces.

  I'd been around long enough to dissect my emotions nearly as quickly as I felt them. Sometimes I woke to find my dreams pre-analyzed, their meaning laid out like the organs of an autopsy. So why was I so fucking mad at Fay?

  Further up, the wall's gray face cancered with grayscale murals. As I approached, they resolved into fractals and repeating geometry. Abstract nothing. I hawked a loogie onto something that might have been a sun. As my spit slid down its squiggly corona, I saw it had traveled from behind my teeth and landed on a set of disembodied ones.

  Canines, molars, incisors, scores of them laid out in uninterpretable patterns. Stolen from the mouths of people I'd never met. Had the AI killed them? Or collected their corpses from the endless drift of space? Was this a monument to their ferocious dominance of the Asteroid Belt, or a memorial to the sad inhumanity of the struggle between them and their corporate fathers?

  I glanced behind me, fearful I'd been seen. No wonder everything I encountered was infinitely strange. It was all the product of the same universe, a whirlpool of quantum foam and star-sized nuclear fires, mad and impenetrable. We were lucky if we ended up making as much sense as the teeth arranged within that alien mural.

  * * *

  Shelby's secretary—a secretary, here inside this god forsaken rock!—granted me an appointment the following afternoon. Hidey-Hole's one "working" shower didn't spray water so much as dribble it over our heads, but Shelby wore her clean blond hair in the simple ponytail that had never been unfashionable anywhere for long. I hadn't bothered to wash in a few days, and as I sat across her desk, which was really a plastic slab set over concrete blocks, I was keenly aware the sphere of my musk was broad enough to reach her narrow nostrils.

  "Good to see you." She finished a final note on her omni and set it aside. "What's up?"

  I frowned. "Given any thought to how we're going to get Baxter out of here with us?"

  She cocked her chin. "Why would we want to do that?"

  "Because it's what he wants."

  "What he wants is irrelevant. What's important is getting the best possible deal for the colonists."

  I sat back. "That's the same thing he wants."

  "He isn't really a 'he,' by the way. Baxter is an 'it.'" She leaned forward, softening her voice. "I'm not being pedantic. Baxter isn't human. Whatever he is, he's actively working against Olympian Atomics' ally HemiCo. That will put OA on the defensive. The defense doesn't want to bargain. It wants to take the ball and go home."

  "I think after what went down in New Houston, OA's already got a pretty good idea we're working with the AI."

  "Exactly why we have to make a show of minimizing our contact with them. Make it look like our relationship was a one-time thing."

  "We're going to fly to Titan inside the AI's hyperintelligent offspring!"

  Shelby wrinkled her nose. "Baxter's played his part. You can come back for him once we're finished."

  I pointed a finger at her. "You weren't like this on Mars."

  "It bothers you that I care about the future of humanity?"

  "It bothers me that you don't give a damn about the people working with you."

  "Compared to what we're working on, our little wants are meaningless." She smacked her palms on the desk and bounced to her feet. "You know, get the hell out of my office."

  "Yeah, it's a pretty impressive place you got here." I stood hard enough to knock over the flimsy plastic chair. "What is it about institutions like this that makes it so easy to forget about the individuals involved in them?"

  "Don't let that high horse bump your head on the door."

  I left with the mixed triumph and frustration of watching a bridge burn to the ground. I didn't have long to dwell on it. An hour later, as I traversed the asteroid's muraled wall, Tiger rushed up fast enough to punch through me like a striped cannonball.

  "Where have you been?"

  I gestured to take in the vast open space. "Here."

  "Fay's been trying to reach you for 43 minutes!"

  I dug the ear bud out of my pocket, pressed the dot mike against my throat. "What?"

  "I hope you're packed," Fay said.

  The colonists on Titan had rebelled. Two executives had died in the riots. Olympian Atomics responded by sending its security force to imprison the rebel leaders. The moon had been locked down for three days. The colonists hadn't been able to transmit a message to us until two hours ago.

  The situation had stabilized, but both sides were angry. The colonists needed us to broker peace now. Fay, after consulting with Shelby and an emergency meeting of the AI meeting, had agreed.

  "We're leaving tomorrow morning," Fay concluded.

  "I'll be ready." I signed off, gazing at the asteroid wall. "Tiger, whose teeth are those?"

  The sphere rolled back a few inches, tilting as if it were cocking its head. "No one you knew."

  "Where can I find Baxter?"

  It rattled off directions. I jogged across the dusty ground. Baxter sat in the bottom of a five-foot pit which, judging by the wireframe shovel stuck into the mound of dirt beside it, he'd dug for himself.

  I leaned over its edge. "Is this some kind of metaphor?"

  "I find physical activity comforting," he answered without looking up. "After digging for a while, I wanted to enjoy the fruits of my labors."

  "Did you hear about Titan?"

  "I heard."

  "And?"

  "Have fun."

  I jumped down beside him. In the lessened gravity, it felt like dropping down a single tall step. "So you're giving in to them."

  He looked up at me with eyes patterned a little too closely to the tooth-mural on the wall. "Perhaps you've lived through so many sets of laws and customs they strike you as an arbitrary and temporal grab-bag of nonsense, superstition, and dunderheaded restriction. Well, I helped establish the ones we have here. If I break this Talk because I do
n't like its result, I would malfunction from hypocrisy." He kept it deadpan. "Then you'd die in the explosion, and I would feel pretty bad up in artificial heaven."

  I nodded, jumped out of the pit, and dialed up Fay. To my moral shock, the ship had already reached the same conclusion I had—and insisted it was necessary.

  The conspirators met me an hour later: Tiger; the blue sphere from the med lab, who hauled a flatbed cart bearing a rumpled tarp; and a white sphere that extended a spindly wire arm to hand me a smooth, bulb-headed black oblong that looked designed for sexual interface. Two buttons protruded from its handle: one red, one green.

  "It's the red one," the sphere said.

  I returned to the pit. Baxter still sat at its bottom.

  "Hey Baxter!" I jumped down beside him. "Not good enough."

  I poked him with the black rod and mashed its red button. The air sizzled; the hair raised on my head and neck. It had the opposite reaction on Baxter. The annoyance blanked from his face and he collapsed on the spot.

  I slung him over my shoulders and brought him up top. Like that, we were on our way to Titan.

  "You're never too rich to turn down a free drink," the middle-aged man said, gazing at Baxter. "Been around here before?"

  "Ask him!" Arthur yelled in Baxter's ear.

  "Not yet," Baxter said out loud. "I just got to New Houston a couple days ago."

  The man raised his brows. "Tourist?"

  "Don't you dare tell him your real name this time!" Arthur said.

  Baxter shook his head. "I wouldn't say that. I burned my passport when I got here. Earth's too far away to spit on."

  The man laughed through his nose. "I hear that."

  Baxter blinked, then realized it was an expression. "But I think that may have been pretty stupid of me."

  The balding man crunched an ice cube between his teeth. "What did Earth ever do for anyone?"

  "I heard from my lawyer this morning. I've got a new court date next month. If I miss it, my soon-to-be-ex-wife will win her suit. She'll take everything."

  "What on God's green earth are you talking about?" Arthur said. "You're supposed to be asking for IDs!"

  13

  Space was supposed to be a paradise. A playground. A universe of graspable magic we could explore together forever. On its most practical level, populating it was a redundancy plan for the single egg-basket that was Earth, but there was a romance to it I had never let go, a vision of rockets and pioneers and impossible flowers under alien skies, a dream that stayed with me long after it became thuddingly obvious the whole idea was an overcooked crock of shit.

  Nonetheless, from down on Earth, Mars and Europa and Titan may as well have been Tombstone or Cheyenne or Deadwood, backwaters where, whatever their frontier charm, nothing important was going to happen until they got a lot bigger and a lot more clued in to how we did things back in civilization. In the meantime, having their barren surfaces so far out of sight and mind made them fertile ground for modes and experiments no one would have risked on Earth.

  I asked Fay to fill me in as soon as we left Hidey-Hole (under constant, gravity-inducing acceleration and then deceleration, the mostly-repaired Frontier Assessment would hit Titan's orbit in seventeen days). Mostly, the history of space was the history of people with the money to turn it into another revenue stream. Groups like HemiCo. Olympian Atomics. Forsun Interplanetary. Our own NightVision Resources, which, at last report, had skipped ahead of schedule on its mining/defense fleet. Fay had delivered this news with such satisfaction I suspected its second-gen brain was directly responsible for pushing the project forward.

  Of course, hearing about these corporate powers from Fay—the offspring of the AI who, since their creation, had been in a shadow war with space's biggest player—was like being told about the Civil War by the grandson of a Georgian Reb. So I kept my metaphorical salt shaker handy as I caught up with nearly two centuries of humanity's existence beyond the envelope of Earth.

  Atlantis, founded Luna, 2032. Initially two living modules with a permanent population of five men and two women. Each new mission, federal or corporate, added more modules. By the time the first module was landed at Mars' New Houston in 2039, gray soil had been broken on the first of Atlantis' underground habitats. Module by module, a dozen different institutions expanded the two settlements. Once the cities established a stable infrastructure, private missions were subsidized by wealthy pioneers aching to be among the first Martians and Lunatics.

  Meanwhile, as the colonies bloomed, Earth suffered a series of blights. An unstable, increasingly hostile climate. Rising sea levels. The Transition Years, when a global economy based on the burning of dinosaur bones collapsed, leading to widescale rebellions and mini-apocalypses. Federal governments shoveled tax dollars at alternative energies and food and shelter for angry citizens. With all that going on, if any politician had suggested squandering funds on Mars or the moon, his constituents would have suggested using those monies to fire him into the sun instead.

  Fusion saved the day before everything got too Mad Max. But by that point, corporate law ruled everything outside Earth's ionosphere, and with entities like Olympian Atomics in control of the fusionable materials that had soothed Earth's social wounds, it would be somewhere between impossible and suicidal for governments to try to mess with them now.

  The colonists saw themselves as pioneers. And they were. But in the Old West, if you didn't like the laws in Wyoming, you moved to Nevada. You could walk, if you really needed to, and when you got there, you could be reasonably certain there would be little things like air and water.

  In New Houston, there was nowhere else to go. You couldn't walk outside the domes and set up a homestead. Private industry owned all sources of heat, water, food, air. If you wanted to leave, you had to plunk down your life savings for a ticket on a commercial flight back to Earth.

  Fay did quite a bit of editorializing at this point. Me, I could see the potential for abuse, but I didn't see how it could have shaken out any other way. I tuned out for a while.

  But what Fay said next perked up my ears.

  What was now known as the Hemiterran Research Corporation had once been Forsun Interplanetary. It had made a killing providing security and logistics for the illegal research facilities peppering Mars and for the safe transport of goods and VIPs across the vacuum. Cash money. But then their accountants had started to do some thinking. When you looked at the numbers, I mean really looked at them, weren't they selling themselves short? Why sell their security services to a much wealthier group like HemiCo when you could use all those troops to simply take HemiCo?

  In 2112, once FI confirmed HemiCo was making breakthroughs in its illegal AI program, they struck.

  Over a few weeks, they rolled up every one of HemiCo's outlying research bunkers. Squashed HC's ad hoc but fiercely violent Armed Resistance Branch. Even, with shocking boldness, captured HC's head office inside the domes of New Houston. With a couple hundred casualties on both sides, Forsun Interplanetary won the war—and got creamed in the press.

  So they took HemiCo's name, and that was the end of that. Faced with a cannibal madman, the other Martian corporations beefed up their own security. The Cor-Wars reached a ceasefire.

  Instead of absorbing each other, business expanded outward. To the Belt, later claimed by the AI. To Callisto, waypoint to the outer planets. Ganymede for its water and the atomic hydrogen fueling Earth's conversion to fusion. Europa, where they found a strange and sullen ecosystem beneath the layers of ice. Triton, founded on the Jovian models as a launching pad into the Kuiper Belt. The water of Enceladus. And Titan, owned by Olympian Atomics, the base of operations for the biggest isotope mining operation in the System.

  The workers on Titan, according to Fay, had always faced the strictest contracts. A lot of people went to the city of Shangri-la on a two- or five-year bid and found the OA-set costs of living were so high they could never afford to leave.

  "That's a company town,"
I said, interrupting Fay's encyclopedic lesson. "How can they do that?"

  "Distance, value, and guns," Fay answered. "They're too far away to touch, they provide half of Earth's fusionable hydrogen, and they have all the things that go boom." Its voice became too puzzled to be annoyed with. "How do you not know this?"

  "Because I had a life. Lots of them. I couldn't tell you the detailed history of the Roman Republic, either."

  "Too busy with your hobbies?"

  "That, too."

  "Why are those so important to you?"

  "Do you have any idea how long three thousand years is?" I laughed. "To name a few, I've dabbled in kung fu, cooking, pottery, offworld survival training, archery, meditation, masturbation, chess, video games, long walks, painting, starting internet flame wars, and poetry."

  "These are more important to you than personal connections?"

  "How long does another person last? If you cut out childhood and when they get all old and embarrassing, you're lucky to get forty good years out of them. A good hobby lasts forever."

  "That's rather cold," Fay said. "I'd rather talk with you than practice firing my laser."

  "Is that your version of archery? Or masturbation?"

  "Be serious!"

  I held up my palms. "How long do you expect us to know each other?"

  "I can't say. I hope it's a long time."

  "Things might be different for you because you have other AI to pal around with forever." I paused a moment, thinking. "But I spent most of my life alone. Without hobbies to kill the time, I would have killed myself centuries ago."

  "I'm going to make my hobby teaching you about Titan!" Fay declared. "Did you know citizenship fees alone cost 8% of the employees' median salary? Or that if you lose your job and can't afford to move, they have a mandatory labor program indistinguishable from indentured servitude?"

  "That's ridiculous. In the long run, it would be more profitable to play it straight." I gazed out the wall at all the stars. "I'm starting to understand why you think the colonists aren't likely to get a fair shake."