Hegemony (38 page)

The instructor stood up. "Alright, Neel, let's go."

"Go where, sir?"

"To medical. You've finished Basic Selection, which makes you a Fleet member and a member of the
aristokratai
; you've just become a
hetairos
, and you're scheduled for uploading in ten minutes."

If any of the medical staff or the senior instructor noticed the panic in Zandy's eyes, they made no mention of it.

The medical personnel were as matter-of-fact as when they had prepped Zandy for her implant surgery, ten thousand hours ago. Only one medical technician, checking in with her for a moment before the procedure started, said anything about it.

"I know it's going fast, but there's no point stretching it out. No doubt you're nervous, but the uploading is really quite routine. We do several hundred every tenkay."

"I thought I might get leave," Zandy said, trying to keep her voice controlled. Would she even have the same voice, when this was over?

"After you've adjusted, you'll get your first leave. Now, from your file, I assume you don't have the funds to convert your birth-body to be a biological avatar?"

"Uhm, no," Zandy said. The Fleet paid for a biosim avatar, an advanced bio-synthetic android body, which was a good thing, since the cost of a biosim was immense. But, paradoxically, converting a human body to become a bio-avatar was even more expensive, and though the Fleet allowed it, the Fleet would not pay for it.

"That's OK. If you ever have those sort of resources, you can use a cloned body; of course your genetic data is on file, and we're going to preserve your ova, for when you might want offspring.

"The basic biosim avatar you're going to wake up in is going to feel and look a lot like your birth body. In fact, we're going to use some of your body's tissues as transplants; it's faster than cloning the parts from your genetic pattern: olfactory tissues, tongue, parts of the genitals..."

"Ah, right," said Zandy, again trying to push down an impulse to panic.

"I know. It sounds rather drastic. But it is actually quite routine, as you will see. Now, are there any basic modifications to the biosim that you want? Of course, you can get modifications later, and we can't do really custom work, like some of the boutiques. But basic changes? Eye or hair or skin color? Cosmetic modifications?"

"Well, Gan says I'd look better with longer legs..." Zandy said with a laugh that sounded close to hysterical to her ears.

"Hmm. Not too much longer; your birth body is well proportioned. But yes, long legs are in style with your basic figure," the med tech said. "Here," he said, showing Zandy a display with a silhouette outline of a female body. "Something like this?" he asked, making a modification to the display, changing the proportions of the silhouette slightly.

"Ah, yes, OK," Zandy said uncertainly.

"Gan would be Ganymede Sandros?
Telestos
Ariadne Sandros' son?" the med tech asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Right. We just uploaded him a hour ago."

"Is he all right?"

"Quite. Adaptation takes a while, as much as a hundred hours for the very first time, but he's fine. Now, please lie back on the cot and relax. One last thing... After we're done with your birth body, do you have any preferences? We can store it cryogenically if you like, or dispose of it. You understand that since we're making a biosim for you now, we're going to be using some crucial parts from your current body, which means that your birth body will not be suitable to make a bio-avatar from when we're done? "

"I understand. I guess..." Zandy took a deep breath and tried to swallow. "Dispose of it," she said, softly.

"All right," said the med-tech, perhaps somewhat kindly. "Now just relax."

There was a hiss and a feeling of coolness against Zandy's arm, and she felt consciousness fade. Her last thought was that the anesthetic shot was the last thing this body, and brain, would ever feel.

When Zandy had woken she had been in utter darkness and silence. There was
nothing
there... just like now...

The rows of
neural net storage units were mostly dark, along with the corridor. Security guard Simon Hanjin watched the blinking lights of the two units that were active and sighed. Security work was often boring, but this was boring even as security work went. This entire corridor in the Yuro Defense Fleet's Fourth Medical Annex building was silent and deserted, except for Hanjin, and the two daemons stored in the medical neural net units.

I wonder if I'm supposed to be guarding them, Hanjin thought. He hadn't been told, when he took the freelance security job, why an armed security guard was wanted for this corridor, or why a freelance guard should be hired instead of assigning one of the building's permanent guards.

Maybe, he thought, it had something to do with this person he was supposed to wait for, someone named Adams, who was due to show up any time now, whereupon Hanjin was done for the night. It all sounded odd, but the employment form had looked proper, and Hanjin needed the money. Still, maybe he should ask for a copy of the employment form when this Adams showed up, if Adams had it; normally he would have gotten a copy when he signed on, but this time the employment search software had not sent a copy to his account. It was all a bit odd.

Hanjin sighed again and walked to the polarized window at the end of the corridor. The window was floor to ceiling; a single smooth transparency interrupted only by a polarization control panel to one side and an emergency fire escape module in the lower corner. If activated, the fire escape would deploy a ultra-thin, flame resistant mesh tube that would reach hundreds of meters down to the ground, allowing people to slide down from the building.

Hanjin dialed the window polarization down and watched the flow of aircars and the lights of the city towers. Usually his job gave him the chance to people watch, which he enjoyed. Not this time, but at least this shift was at night, so the city lights were worth seeing.

Hanjin watched the flow of aircars for a while, silent through the thick polycarbonate "glass" of the building, looking out for the sleeker models, or ones with unpolarized windows, where he could catch a glimpse of pilots or passengers. New Cap  City wasn't large enough to have the kind of ultra-high density air traffic that the really big cities on the core worlds got, but the aircars and the holographic billboards aimed at them made for a neat view even so.

One of the passing aircars slowed, just then, coming to a hover no more than a hundred meters past the window. That was odd, Hanjin thought. The traffic pattern here did not include any stops. The car, a sporty looking gold skimmer, rotated in its hover and faced the window. It looked like it was exactly on his level, not a single level above or below, though from even a hundred meters away that could be an illusion. Hanjin frowned and moved to reduce the polarization of the window even further.

The car shot forward, looking like it was heading right for the window. Hanjin clamped down a shout and backed away from the window. The car showed no sign of stopping.

An instant before it hit, the building's collision alarms rang and flashing blue lights strobed from the emergency fire escape unit, bright enough to fill the room. Hanjin turned and threw himself down.

The aircar hit the window with a crack, ramming into the polycarbonate transparency and ripping the entire panel from its frame. Hanjin felt his ears pop with the sudden change in pressure as the wind outside the hospital tower sucked at the air in the corridor. The alarm was ringing loudly, a constant klaxon.

Hanjin looked back over his shoulder. The car was at rest on the floor of the corridor. The wind outside the tower was sucking up random bits of debris and loose dust from the corridor and venting it into the night sky. From the floor, Hanjin pulled the sidearm from his belt holster. He couldn't imagine what was going on, but this was no accident.

The canopy of the car slid open and a figure jumped out, holding a hand weapon ready. Hanjin had just come to his feet when he saw the weapon, a sidearm laser, flash. Hanjin felt a violent electric shock and then felt himself hit the ground again. He could distantly feel his muscles convulsing, but there was almost no actual sensation. A stun pulse, he thought.

From where he lay, he could see the figure who had shot him get out of the aircar. A second figure, the aircar's pilot, joined the first, and Hanjin could see it was a short woman wearing black. The woman reached back into the aircar and pulled out a third person. That one, also a woman, was limp; dead or unconscious.

The man walked quickly to the two active storage units, and Hanjin found he had enough control of his eyes to track the movement. The man plugged in a wrist comp into one and then the other, then said "This one."

The short woman carried the unconscious one up to the storage unit in a fireman's carry as the man produced a high density data cable.

They were going to transfer the daemon in the storage unit into the body, Hanjin realized. The third person must an inactive avatar.

The effects of the stun pulse were beginning to wear off, and Hanjin found that he could move a bit. He had dropped his needler pistol when he had been shot, and anyway he wasn't sure if the chem-stun needles would even work against an avatar.

The man connected the inert avatar to the storage unit, and Hanjin could see the monitor light up as it diagramed the transfer of the daemon in the storage unit to the avatar. It might be a kidnapping, Hanjin realized, and it was probably the very thing he had been assigned here to prevent. Slowly he rolled to his hands and knees and began to crawl toward his needler.

The man looked at him and smiled apologetically. "Sorry," he said, and shot Hanjin again. This time it felt like touching a live wire and the world went dark.

---

Zandy could see light. It had been dark for so long that for a while she was not sure she was seeing it. It was faint, just a trickle leaking in past closed eyelids. But it seemed real... and that meant that she had eyelids again.

Zandy opened her eyes and tried to take in what she saw, but the images were odd and distorted. They made her dizzy, but that too was a sensation and it triggered a rush of related sensations. She was dizzy even though she was sitting down, and with that realization she could feel: the seat she was in, clothes on her skin, a restraint holding her in to the seat. There was sound as well, a warbling hum, and odd sounding voices, and smells that she could not recognize. Everything felt wrong, felt strange. And she had felt this way before.

"Take it easy, Pilot Officer Neel," said a man's voice. "You're in a new avatar, and it's not pre-configured. You're going to feel disoriented, dizzy perhaps."

"Yeah," mumbled Zandy. Her voice sounded strange. She tried to look around, but her eyes, her new eyes, were full of polychromatic glare. Shapes swam in front of her, sounds echoed strangely. A pairs of hands reached forward to catch her as she started to slump.

"Here, drink this," said a woman's voice. Zandy strained to look up and see who was talking. A drinking tube pushed its way into her mouth and she sucked. The taste was tart and sweet, and very clear to her. Taste, she thought. It always seemed to be taste that came through first.

"Taste usually stabilizes first," said the woman's voice.

---

"Taste usually stabilizes first," said the Fleet Academy doctor. 

"Right," said Zandy, almost mumbling the word.

"In your case, the olfactory transplant did not fully succeed, so part of your olfactory sense is bio-synthetic... it may take longer to acclimate to, though it won't affect your senses in the long run."

"I understand," Zandy had said. The sound of her voice was odd, alien, in her own ears. Except that, they weren't
her
ears, and it wasn't
her
voice. It was an avatar, and she was a daemon, if there was still a
she
left at all.

It had been three days now, since she had woken up in this strange, new,
wrong
body. It was a body that refused to do quite what she told it to. Every sight was wrong, too sharp, or too
something
; colors too bright, or just a tiny bit wrong. Every sound was off too, and her own motions and voice...

"Disorientation, lasting as much as a hundred hours, is normal and to be expected," the doctor had said. He was not the same med-tech who had spoken to her before the procedure. And silently, despairingly, Zandy suspected that it was not the same
her
either.

Everything was wrong except for taste. Her tongue, she remembered, was actually
hers.
It was a transplant from her old body. So the slightly tart fruit juice that she could drink from the hospital bed's dispenser tasted the same, tasted
right.
She clung to that, as her body slowly learned to obey her mind's commands.

It was odd, Zandy thought, some time later, that there was no difference in the feeling of her thoughts. She felt nothing hinting at an artificiality when she closed her eyes and just thought. It seemed that her mind was still the same, even if it wasn't housed in a biological brain anymore. It was her new body that felt alien.