Sliding Void (7 page)

‘I am not sure about this.’ The cap starting to itch as Zeno fiddled with the strange black length of—

MotherfuckerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRR!

— impact-retardant plastic, the sim controls still clutched in Zeno’s hands after all this time.

‘You son of a bitch!’ Calder tugged the cap off his head. ‘Sticking me with a sim when my brain’s still hot from some half-price neural rewrite.’

Zeno pushed Calder back. ‘Down, your highness. That’s the trouble with these damn things. You going to be pimp-rolling down the ship like police rather than crew.’ He clicked a button on the side of the remote, advancing through the titles he had on the ship’s archive. He stopped when the words,
Hell Fleet
: Episode Twelve were flashing on the remote’s tiny green screen. ‘This show is a lot more relevant to business on board the
Gravity Rose
. Six months as an ensign in a TAFC jump carrier. But let’s wait until this afternoon to make a spacer out of you. Otherwise you’d be kicking down doors and maybe hit an airlock release by mistake. Too much too soon is going to fry your mind – but I’ve got to warn you, soon enough your barbarian butt’s going to be gagging for another episode.’

‘I’m no sim addict,’ protested Calder. ‘And you are a... robot, an android.’

‘Good guess. Wasn’t any robots starring in that cop show, is how I remember it. Amish don’t allow robots on their world, not even in the spaceport. ’Cept you didn’t want to call me a robot, did you? Go on man, use the old cop slur…’

‘Oiler.’

‘See, ten minutes as a cop and you’re already acting like a racist. Yeah, I’m a dirty oiler. Just like you’re an even filthier fleshy.’

Calder rubbed his aching forehead. His scalp felt hot. But he suddenly realized it was his mind, cooling from being excited by the headset.  He couldn’t believe it had all vanished, that it had never even existed in the first place. A whole other life. He had been a police agent travelling between worlds, tackling federal cases for the alliance where local law enforcement was either lacking, corrupt or out of its depth. Calder looked down at his hands, expecting to still see the blood on his hands from the last stand on the Amish world. His partner dead, sold out by a racketeering spaceport manager. Only Calder left, Calder and a few backwoods farmers who he’d convinced to throw aside their pacifists tenets and take up arms against the offworld hitmen arriving to execute the only witnesses to an interstellar crime boss’s villainy. Calder had saved the woman and her son in the witness protection programme, exposed the conspiracy and taken care of the crime family’s henchmen. Calder had saved the goddamn day, and this was his reward? He looked at the sailor with new eyes. Except for Zeno’s golden metal skin and the spiky steel Afro, his face was human. ‘But you’re no clanking machine, why the hell would you need oil?’

Zeno held out his arm, a section of golden skin rippling back to reveal a conduit of black liquid flowing across a carbon frame embedded with micro-machinery. ‘I don’t bleed blood, just nanotechnology. That’s where your racist cop shit is coming from.’

‘Gods!’

‘Yeah, right about now, you’re thinking that life with the Amish and your head stuck between your ass is looking like your gravy. I’m right?’

‘You’re not wrong,’ said Calder. ‘The rest of the crew, are they similar to the creatures I saw in the spaceport? Are they aliens?’

‘Cop instincts now.’ Zeno whistled in appreciation. ‘The
Gravity Rose
has got five crew. Well, maybe six, with you. We’ll see how that works out. You’ve met Lana Fiveworlds, the skipper. Me, you know. There’s Zack Paopao who takes care of the engines and the engineering on the rear of this bucket. Fleshy-ass human, same as you. Kind of a recluse, though. Our navigator and pilot is called Polter. He’s a kag, which is to say a kaggen. Negotiator and cargo man is Skrat. He’s a skirl. They’re aliens, although truth to tell, humanity hasn’t thought of them as anything other than weird-looking amigos for millennia. You’ll be seeing why we didn’t bring either of those two down to your world. You get to lay eyes on a man-sized talking lizard and a giant sentient crab inside Matobo’s tower and we’d need to be taking your medication to a whole new level.’

‘What do you do on the ship?’

‘Me?’ Zeno placed his arms behind his wire Afro and leaned back in the chair. ‘I pretty much run this place. There’s a couple of thousand robots on the ship, real oilers – not self aware, like yours truly. Everything from talking vacuum cleaners to hull repair drones. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, they’re all answering to me. I’m the bot boss, the go-to-guy, the man with a plan. I guess you humans prefer having an android on board to manage the vessel’s mechs. Makes you feel a little less like you’re gang masters in the slavery business.’

‘I don’t understand,’ sighed Calder. ‘How is that you’re intelligent while they aren’t?’

Zeno shrugged. ‘Trick ain’t building something like me, man. Trick is building something smart enough to be useful, but dumb enough
not
to go self-aware. Lot of effort goes into that. Take the
Gravity Rose
’s main computer core. If our ship’s AI, granny, develops herself a little self-awareness, you think she going to want to haul high-quality machine parts from point A to point B for Fiveworlds Shipping? Shit no. She’s going to be all, ‘Hey, there’s a quasar near here. I ain’t never seen me a quasar. Can’t we jump over there, skipper? Please. Please!’ Your ship gets herself a soul, then the law says you need to fly yourself to the nearest planet and strip the vessel the fuck down and re-home her. You don’t have a ship no more, you got yourself a citizen. What us spacers call a
wilful
ship. If you’re sliding void with a cheap-ass outfit, they’re going to be tempted to erase that baby girl and do a dirty re-install out in the darks where the law ain’t looking too hard. Sometimes ships go missing, and you just know that some fool crew had themselves a ‘Sorry Dave, I can’t do that’ moment. I was one of the first oilers, man.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Back when Sony-Warner didn’t know how quantum computing would stir up the soup of an artificial mind. You think they were happy to lose an asset and gain an employee? Sentience is all about complexity; that’s what separates you and me from a lump of stone. Well,’ he pointed to a silvery figure on a shelf, a hand-sized sculpture. ‘My smarts, residual royalties, and that, a genuine Oscar back from when there was a Republic of California and Hollywood was a place by the shining sea, not the fourth moon of Texicana.’

‘You had better feed me another sim,’ said Calder. ‘I’m losing you again.’

‘All I’m saying is that old Zeno’s over three times older than that castle on Hesperus you were taking a leak on. All this is new for you. It’s real ancient to me.’ He patted Calder on the shoulder. ‘But that’s my problem, not yours. Let’s head to the bridge and greet the freaks.’

Calder felt a shiver of apprehension. He had glimpsed a few non-humans arriving in the space port in the sim episode, but like the android had said, that was more real than real. How would actual reality stack up to a cop show? ‘They’re friendly, the aliens?’

‘They’re good as human. You were a TAP agent for six months, right? That’s where the triple in Triple Alliance Police comes from. Humans, kaggenish, and skirls. The three main species of the alliance. The Triple Alliance is the nearest thing to a superpower in this corner of the galaxy. I sit your ass through the pilot episode of
Hell Fleet
, and you’ll know all you need to know about The Man. Except that we try and stay clear of alliance space on the
Gravity Rose
. We’re a small indie outfit so we work the independent worlds. That’s the Edge space your cop buddies were so scornful of.’

‘The Edge is light on law.’

‘Light on bureaucracy, too,’ said Zeno, opening the door to his cabin. ‘You reach your thousandth birthday and you realise that life’s too short for that paper-pushing, permit-chasing shit.’

***

Calder hadn’t seen anything like the bridge of The
Gravity Rose
before. He found himself standing in a heavily armoured tower in the middle of the vessel’s superstructure, looking out over the pitted metal hull. An industrial landscape of pipes, plates, sensor dishes and modular hardware – the vista dotted with lights: yellow from her portholes; red from her hull beacons, green-tinted illumination from domes filled with creepers and trees and the assorted bounty of hydroponics domes. The vegetation’s shadows were slowly shifting across the cold mechanical valleys and rises outside, a flickering green web, the hydroponics’ forest canopies moving with the breeze of air circulation systems. It wasn’t the infinite star-scattered darks outside the ship that stunned the young exile, however. Nor the hazed view of the universe that came from standing behind a rippling magnetic shield. The bridge’s interior was enough to stun him all by itself. Hard to discern the bridge’s crucifix-shaped chamber, ceiling and walls – a bony grid ostensibly exposed to the void outside between her dark carbon struts. Console pits swam with chattering icons while crew chairs floated in the air suspended on purring crane arms, and behind the ranks of systems desks and console banks, the whole command centre was painted with a dancing rainbow storm of holograms. Like a dream’s procession, flat oblongs of sensor displays flickered into existence in the air, briefly sketching out the velocity and vector of distant comets. Just one of a hundred displays, a thousand icons, disappearing and reforming across the deck… a storm of information overload. Colour-coded and three-dimensional. Water use. Cabin temperatures. Malfunctioning atmosphere recycling systems due repair. Empty storage chambers being sterilised by exposure to the void. Buggy ship sub-routines being rebooted. Robots being allocated. Droids being recharged. Solar flares being monitored.

Zeno came up behind the prince-in-exile. ‘Hell of a sight, isn’t it.’

‘It’s a complete mess. How can you make any sense out of this? You might as well stand behind the wheel of an ice schooner and invite half your crew to scream directions at you while the rest leap up and down tossing maps and charts in your direction.’

Zeno tapped the side of his head, smiling knowingly. ‘These days, there’s a little bit of me in every human – the droid inside. Not inside your Amish friends, of course. They don’t do implants. But the crew of the
Gravity Rose
have them. Without a computer implanted inside your skull, you can’t possibly cope with this much information. We might as well let the ship’s AI, granny, push out on autopilot, retire to our cabin for the duration and sip cocktails for the rest of the voyage. Some crews do that. Not the clever ones, though, remember that. Lazy out here ain’t that much different from dead.’

Calder shivered in dread.
Is that apprehension mine, or residual memories from rubbing shoulders with the Amish for so long
? To have an organic computer nestled alongside your brain like a leech, the machine’s creepers sucking nourishment from your blood, sending you information when you summoned it, filtering this headache of information overload into some semblance of sense. ‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Personally speaking,’ smiled Zeno, ‘I’d say that the droid inside is what makes you human, these days, if that ain’t a contradiction. A little bit of logic and analysis to cool those animal passions. You’ll need an implant, too, if you’re to work on board. Time comes, maybe you’ll even want it.’

‘I can’t imagine that.’

‘Try experiencing it viscerally, first, in the pilot episode of
Hell Fleet
. Then tell me you don’t want it.’

‘Do you need an implant to handle this?’

‘Man, when it comes to this, I am an implant. To me, what you see here is slow motion. This dance can speed up; if the ship’s threatened, for instance. But you fleshy types can’t cope with too much hypervelocity decision-making, not without being seriously genetically modified. And then you don’t appear so human anymore.’

‘Does the
Gravity Rose
get threatened often? I thought she was a merchantman, not a warship?’

‘More than you’d think. Any jump-capable starship is worth a fortune, even today. These babies aren’t like ground cars, one sitting in every citizen’s garage. And to pay for a cargo to be transported between worlds is no small thing – a load’s got to be seriously valuable to someone, somewhere. You rub those two economic laws together, and there’s no shortage of pirates, privateers, hijackers, criminals and corrupt governments looking to steal, jack, kill or impound our ass and take everything we have. For crew, it’s like travelling with a million dollars stuffed inside our trousers.’

‘If the ship is worth so much, why doesn’t the captain just sell the vessel and retire to a life of luxury?’

‘I guess Lana likes moving about too much for that. Besides, the
Gravity Rose
has been passed down through her family. The ship is like a family member to the skipper. Only one she’s still got, as it happens. That makes us her cousins or some such. Every ship you’d want to serve on is like that. We’re more than brothers in arms – or tentacles and claws – and you wouldn’t sell your grandmother, would you?’