Hegemony (39 page)

Or rather, had felt alien at first. By 90 hours, she could walk smoothly, and her sight and hearing and even her sense of touch felt OK. Perhaps, she thought, she was forgetting what they had once felt like, when she had been biological.

The med techs told her it was the biosim and her neural net brain adapting to each other and to her mind, which was now a quantum singularity of data in the neural net.

Of course, her
mind
had always been a quantum singularity of data, Zandy told herself, a bit desperately. It was just that it had started as a naturally created data singularity, housed in a naturally created biological neural net called a human brain.

And for that matter, her biosim body was more biological than it was mechanical. A central pump still gave her a heartbeat, pumping artificial circulatory fluid through analog organs and tissues that acted like the human organs she had once possessed. She still ate, feeding a bio-reactor housed in her biosim's abdomen, and still obtained energy to run her new body from that food. She still slept, and dreamed.

It was her waking hours that were dream-like. The face that looked back at her from the mirror was almost the same; the differences were less than the difference that the last ten thousand hours, between her arrival at the Academy and her uploading, had made to her biological face. But it was different even so.

Her body was more obviously different. The skin was smoother, more perfect than her skin had been, though it still looked human, and now that her sense of touch was stabilizing, it felt human too. Her fingers and toes had an odd perfection to them that was jarring to see. Her legs were a few centimeters longer, her proportions looked more idealized. Nude, she looked sleeker, and even more toned than she had before, though by the end of ten thousand hours at the Academy her biological body had been very fit.

She had, on the advice of the med-techs, tried to masturbate, and had discovered, at length, that her biosim body was capable of orgasm. By the end of 150 hours, she could not even say that it felt odd.

"Gan!" Zandy called out, seeing her old roommate in the crowd at the New Ionia Geosynchronous Station. Like her, even on leave he still wore a Fleet uniform, and like her it was the Formal Fleet Blacks, the non-skin-tight, padded-shoulders version of the standard Fleet uniform. The smooth carbon-black cloth was barely disturbed by a few gold rank and qualification glyphs. There were a few other uniformed Fleet personnel in the free-fall tumult of people in the station's main hub, but few enough that they stood out.

Zandy darted towards him, pushing off of zero-gee people movers and twisting out of the way of passersby. Her new body almost betrayed her; her movements were not quite perfectly timed, but she
knew
how to move in free-fall, better than most of the people in the crowd.

"Zandy!" Gan exclaimed, and reached out to grab her as she drifted past, twisting to face him as she went. His movement seemed smooth, to her. His hands on hers felt normal; warm skin. The smile on his face was the same Gan, too. Inwardly, Zandy felt a shudder of relief.

"Zandy, you made it!"

"You too, huh?"

"Of course!" Gan said. "What do you think?" he went on, pulling himself straight and throwing his shoulders back. "Do you like it?"

"You look the same," Zandy said, "but I
think
we should get out of this passway before we become part of an involuntary game of zero-gee billiards."

A few moments later, in a free-fall cantina off the main corridor, Gan preened again.

"Well, what
do
you think?"

"Custom job?" Zandy asked, assuming that he was showing off his new body.

"Of course," Gan said. "Top of the line from the Pindaros Design Studios."

Zandy laughed, first a little and then again, almost giddy at the way the laughter felt; normal, unchanged from before. Human.

"Uhm, you look the same, Gan. Wait... maybe a bit taller?"

"Hmph! I'll have you know, you primitive," Gan said, smiling, "that there are almost a hundred subtle changes to my body. A work of art!" he finished, barely holding back his own laughter.

"Can't see any difference from here," Zandy said.

"Well, I can. You look better. Longer legs, no? Very nice. Anyway, if you want to see the differences in the new me up close, I think we can arrange something."

"I'd like that," Zandy said, and leaned forward to kiss him.

Sex with Gan had been a good idea, Zandy mused, as she sat in the descending Orbital Elevator capsule, watching New Ionia swell in her seat's display. More than anything since she woke up in her new avatar, it had made her feel that nothing had really changed. Of course, that was nonsense. Everything had changed. She was a daemon, inhabiting a bio-technical android body made to look like her old self. But having sex with Gan had felt almost the same; both of them had been a bit clumsy, a bit tentative, but there was nothing alien or artificial in the feeling of their love making.

And it was still the same Gan. And that gave her the best, most comforting confirmation yet that she was still the same Zandy.

"Where are the brats?" Zandy asked, trying to keep her voice light, standing in her formal Fleet Blacks in front of her mother, seeing her old home for the first time in more than ten thousand hours.

The old apartment was a shock, even though it looked unchanged from her memory of it. The garish flower print pattern of the walls, the faded colors, the extruded plastic furniture. It wasn't even that cramped, not compared to station-side quarters, though in a gravity field the available volume was a fraction of what it would have been in free-fall.

But it was so
shabby
, Zandy thought. And so primitive. Her data link detected almost no wireless signals at all. Nothing except for the navigation signals from the air car traffic lanes, far above. Neither were there any data screens; almost no electronics at all. She had been forced to hire a courier to deliver a hard copy print-out telling them that she had leave and was planning to visit; her family still didn't have any other way to receive the message.

The sounds of the place were all of people: people talking, cooking, working. Even with her new, synthetic, olfactory sense, the smells were the same as she remembered; fresh bread and fried onions, some hints of pungent spices. After the sterile smells of the Academy Station, it was almost sensory overload.

"Where are Aeson and Dora and Kleo?" she asked again. It was obvious that her brother and her sisters weren't in the apartment, though their things, assorted toys and school-issued plastic data prints, were all over the place.

"I sent them away for the day," her mother answered, in a flat tone, not angry, not glad... just resigned.

"God! Why? I only have twenty hours leave left. I haven't seen them in a tenkay!"

"I don't want them to see you."

"
What
?" Zandy said, suddenly seemingly unable to speak louder than a whisper.

"If they see you, looking like some sort of... whatever you are..." her mother was whispering too, a harsh sound, to go with a face set with sudden, vicious anger, "they might decide to follow you. I've already lost one child. I won't lose any more.

"You look the same...
Almost
the same," her mother went on, "but it's not you. It's not the same Zandy. I've lost you, but I won't lose them."

"How could you do that?" Zandy asked. "Why?"

"Beg pardon,
Tel
Neel," her mother said in a false bright voice. "That's the right way to address you now, isn't it? Since you're
aristokratai
now? I'm just a
demos
, so forgive me if I get it wrong."

Zandy had left without a word, walking out of the apartment that had been home, once. Her father had met her at the street corner as she started back towards the transit station.

"Alekzandra," he said, again in a tone that was neither glad nor sad nor angry.

She looked back at him, saying nothing.

"I'm... I'm sorry," he said, not quite meeting her eyes.

Zandy felt tears running down her face; she had been told that her biosim avatar could cry, would cry at any stimulus that would have made her cry before.

"Tell... tell my brother and my sisters," she said, looking down and trying to keep her voice clear through the tears, "that I've banked some of my pay for them. When they're old enough, they can access it at the New Ionia Fleet Service Bank. It's in their names. They can use it... pay for a better school, or even a place in the city... out of the residence zones.

"You too, if you want," she went on, still not looking up. "I'll leave your name in the account too... if you want to..."

"Zone Garnet is my home, Zandy," her father said, softly.

"...And not mine," she whispered.

"I didn't know avatars could cry," her father said.

"Now you know."

Labeck Pyer, or
rather Pyer Beck, leaned his head forward against his steepled fingers. The situation was getting worse. Since he and his team had relocated to this planet, the plan had grown more and more complex and the execution more and more frayed.

The local agent's clumsy attempts to clean up had exploded into a mess far worse than what would have happened if the man had left things alone. Pyer thought he could now deduce, to a reasonable certainty, who his agent must be. A very highly placed agent indeed. But that made no difference. The surviving daemon from the Hegemonic assault-ship was gone, stolen from where it had been stored before it could be eliminated.

And there seemed to be problems with the remaining swift-ship. Its prior captain was unaccounted for, had not reported to her new command... At least the data captured by the swift-ship had been dealt with. Pyer had to admit that the local agent had handled
that
quite well. If only he had left it at that. For that matter, if only Pyer's superiors hadn't decided to try their convoluted and complex cover-up involving the destruction of the freight-liner.

At least that part of the plan had gone well; the ship had been destroyed in a very visible manner, and the pirates who had done it were gone as well, destroyed. With them was gone any possibility of that part of the plan unraveling.

Pyer assumed that other evidence was now being planted, by other deep cover operatives, showing the entire thing to be some sort of trade cartel war. How that was supposed to convince anyone, given that a Hegemonic assault-ship had gone missing, was lost on Pyer, but someone above him in the chain of command at least
thought
that there was a way.

At any rate, that was none of his concern. All he had to do was clean up the mess in his own operational area. He had to find the captain of that swift-ship. He suspected that if he did that, he would find the interceptor pilot as well. Once they were dealt with, that would complete the damage control for the local agent's stupid premature assassination attempt.

It was annoying to Pyer that, when he reported back, he'd have to report the local agent's success in erasing the data from the swift-ship in the same breath as the idiotic assassination attempt. In deep cover operations, there was always a tendency, usually wise, to go for whichever course of action required minimal effort. All too likely, in the judgment of his handlers the success would counterbalance the failure. And since leaving the local agent active was the course of minimal effort, he would be kept in his current place. Pyer would rather have simply cleaned the man up and started local infiltration again from scratch; in Pyer's professional experience, people who made the sort of mistake that the assassination attempt represented were too dangerous to use as assets, even if they sometimes did good work.

But that didn't matter; it wasn't Pyer's call. Indeed, Pyer had not, and would not, even confirm if his suspicions about the identity of the local agent were correct. No, the problem ahead of him was how to find the fugitive Hegemonic Fleet officers.

It was possible that all of his problems were unconnected, but he had to assume otherwise. He was fairly certain that the fugitive captain, her name was Tralk, had regained control of her swift-ship, a move he was certain had been prompted by the assassination attempt. The local agent had been able to trace records of her signal transfer from the surface to her previous command and then back down again, but since then there had been no trace of her.

The recapture of that swift-ship meant he had very little time. The local agent could monitor access to orbital shuttles and to the orbital elevator, so if Tralk tried to get back to her ship physically he would know about it in time to intercept her. He also had sources that would inform him if the captain signal-transferred herself back to her ship again. But if she did
that
, she'd be
at
her ship before he could do anything about it.

The ability of daemons to transfer themselves from place to place was infuriating. Most of them did not like leaving their android bodies behind, but when they needed to, they could.