The Unincorporated War (12 page)

“How long will the units be in space?” asked Justin.

“Not more than a week, sir.”

Justin watched for a few moments more.

“Very impressive, Mr. Isozaki,” he said, looking back once again to the chief engineer. “You’re to be commended.”

“No, not me, sir,” protested the chief engineer. “If Omad-san had not suggested the idea, we would not be here.”

Omad’s grin suddenly turned to a scowl. “Oh no, you don’t, you son of a bitch. I had an idea after waking up from an all-night bender and then mumbled a few things to you in my delirium.”

“Hardly delirium, Omad,” began Kenji.

“Who did all the calculations?” snapped Omad.

“Me, but—”

“—Drew up the plans for and then created the portable infrastructure?”

“I did, Omad-san, but—”

“—Then calibrated the magnipulsers to redirect a million projectiles flying out of orbit pretty much all at the same time?”

“Well, yes, that was me as well, but—”

“No buts, Kenji. You can just shift that damned spotlight off me. I won’t take it. Plus I don’t like bright lights … against my religion.”

Kenji looked confused.

“Beerintology,” answered Justin, revealing his and Omad’s inside joke.

“But Omad-san,” continued Kenji, “it was your idea. I remember clearly—”

“Drunk, Kenji, drunk as a miner who just made majority.” Omad considered the anachronism. “OK, well, ‘just became unincorporated’ then, and I don’t remember it like that at all.”

Kenji, Justin could now see, was as determined and stubborn as his buddy, only more taciturn. It explained the effectiveness of their partnership.

In this particular argument, though, Justin knew that Kenji was giving credit where credit was due. Omad had not gone on a bender. In fact, he hadn’t been on one in nearly a year. Not since Justin had found him celebrating a promotion to Quartermaster General in his usual inimitable fashion. At the time Justin had chosen to drag his friend onto a hover disk, fly a few hundred meters across the Cerian Sea, and then from a height of about twenty feet unceremoniously dump him into it. Of course, Justin could have used a standard-issue nanospray to sober Omad up, but that would’ve been beside the point. And that point, which Justin had made sure to tell his angry, shocked, and nearly drowning friend, was a matter of life and death. If Omad screwed up, Justin had explained, people could die. Once the newly promoted Quartermaster General had been forced to acknowledge that rather salient fact—not without the usual litany of creative expletives involving every one of Justin’s past relatives—Justin had pulled him out of the frigid waters. Though Omad had had plenty to drink since that ignominious day, to his credit, realized Justin, Omad had never been drunk since.

It was, Justin knew, a brilliant plan. Omad had thought it up and Kenji had given it life.

But Justin didn’t really care. He was starting to think it might actually work.

“Nadine?” asked Neela, this time more forcefully. She put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. The woman looked up from the mess she was busy helping the still-muttering vendor restack. Neela was going to give Nadine a hug, but when she saw the expression on her eldest sister’s face she thought better of it. The hug was turned into a tentative wave.

“I had no idea you were on Mars,” sputtered Neela. “I … I would’ve called.”

“Had I known you were in this town,” Nadine answered, barely making eye contact, “I wouldn’t have set one foot outside my bungalow.” Nadine then proceeded to pay the vendor for his troubles. As soon as the transaction was complete she turned her back on her sister and began to walk away.

Neela stood speechless. Their relationship had always been somewhat antagonistic—she’d chalked it up to sibling rivalry—but never with the ire she was now experiencing. She decided to get to the bottom of the matter, and quickly.

“Wait!” she said, once again catching up to and touching her sister’s shoulder. Neela’s escorts followed discreetly, smiling uncomfortably at the locals.

Nadine swung around, rage in her eyes. “How could you, Neeny?” seethed her sister.

“How could I what?” answered Neela, exasperated.

“Please,” spat her sister. “Don’t you know what you’ve done to our family?”

Neela’s patience had worn thin.

“Why, no, Nadie,” Neela shot back, using what she knew to be her sister’s hated nickname. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

“Forget it,” snapped Nadine, and once again started walking away.

“Oh no, you don’t,” said Neela, swinging around to block her sister’s path.

They’d stopped at the entrance to a small alley abutted by a bakery and coffee shop.

“Fine, Mrs.
Cord
,” answered her sister, managing to turn Neela’s new last name into a pejorative. “You’re a traitor
and
a pervert. Then again, you always were an overachiever.”

Neela was dumbstruck. She knew there’d been some dissension within the family about her recent nuptials, but the distance from Earth as well as the recent swirl of events had kept her in the dark as to the extent.

“How … how could you say something so hurtful, Nadine?”

“How could you sleep with a patient?” Nadine shot back. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Despite her increased anger, Neela was momentarily forced to smile with the simplicity of her answer. “I fell in love.”

Nadine stared blankly and then suddenly burst out in tears. And then just as quickly wrapped her younger sister in her arms. Neela stood rigid, not sure what to do, but also felt her anger melt away. Nadine was, after all, the older sister she’d always looked up to—despite the rivalry. And when their parents had been too busy with their careers and dreams of majority it had always been Nadine to step in and offer comfort.

“Oh, daring and daft Neely,” her sister was saying through the tears, “can’t you see what you’re doing is wrong, so very, very wrong?”

Though Neela was glad that Nadine had dropped her belligerence, the sudden and strange turnabout had awakened the psychologist within.
Something’s wrong,
thought Neela,
but what?
She automatically went into danger assessment, glanced up and down the street, and saw to her relief that the two grunts who had been following her had been joined by three more, all of whom she knew to be both brave and dependable. They nodded at her in recognition.
I’m part of an army of fifty thousand troops. We occupy this entire island and have complete control over the orbits of Mars, both outer and inner. Five of my guys are within forty feet of me. OK, calm down, Neela, you’re covered.
She dismissed the nagging thought and in doing so made the most fateful decision of her life.

Sebastian was looking at the human plans for shipping the captives away from Mars and marveling at just how ingenious the biologicals could be. With all of his vast computational abilities, centuries of experience, and the ability to comprehend cognitively at a ratio of five avatar minutes to one human second, he would never have come up with such a crazy idea. And yet, he reflected bemusedly, it seemed to be working. It didn’t take him long to decide that he was going to make it work for himself as well. If he could get some of the suspension units filled with storage cubes, he could easily bring out not only avatars from the Martian Neuro but also large parts of the Neuro itself. All sorts of stored data as well as some obscure but comprehensive programs representing the work of generations of avatarity could be secured. The avatars of the Alliance had all the basic, day-to-day software they needed to run their neck of the woods, but sometimes extraordinary applications were needed and requested from the vast store houses of data on Mars and Earth. Sebastian realized it would now be easy to get the automated cryonics facility to store data cubes in the pods instead of people and that Justin Cord’s current operation would act as the transportation. There’d no longer be any need to hide the avatars in storage or mask them as simple programs. If the Alliance avatars could just take the data whole, calculated Sebastian, thirty human suspension units would do the trick. The problem was what would the humans do when they opened up those thirty units and found not people but crystal after crystal of data that no human should ever be allowed to see in raw form? They might get the wrong idea and think it a corporate core plot, or worse, thought Sebastian, they might get the right idea.

One plan Sebastian was working on had the orbiting magnipulsers tweaking the jettisoned pods just enough so that they’d drift in an imperceptible arc toward another location in the belt. But arranging a pickup with an automated ship was proving to be a little more difficult than in times past. The humans were being far more suspicious of little glitches and odd requests. Maybe, he reasoned, the solution would be to let the units get picked up by the humans’ waiting cargo ships and then figure out a way to unload them separately at the Ceres port. This plan too was not without its inherent risks. Sebastian decided to open up the problem to avatars operating in the secure network.
After all,
he reasoned,
a multitude of minds had to be better than one.
He was about to put it forth when Evelyn appeared unannounced, a surprising event given the avatar protocol of chiming, pinging, or knocking in such a way as to make one’s presence known. Sebastian had to assume it was of vital importance.

“I’ve been cut off from Neela!” cried Evelyn.

“Is it human or avatar blocking the connection?” he asked calmly.

“I don’t know!”

Evelyn, Sebastian could see, had picked up a glitch and was incapable of
functioning at full capacity. To help Neela now Sebastian would have to have access to Evelyn’s core programming structures. She gave him permission to override. The problem, he knew, while swallowing up Evelyn’s and Neela’s data paths whole, lay in the intimacy of avatarity itself. An avatar attached to a human could sometimes get too emotionally involved. No matter how hard they tried to keep their distance, the fact remained that many avatars had an almost unearthly connection with their humans. After all, the avatars had been watching over them since before birth. With perfect recall an avatar could remember every game played, every knee bruised, and every little triumph a parent would usually miss. As Sebastian pulled in Evelyn’s memories he was able to watch as Neela for the first time decided to walk across a room. He could see from her biofeedback that the tiny and vulnerable toddler was scared. He saw from Evelyn’s memories her concern at that very moment. He allowed himself to feel toddler Neela’s pain on her repeated failures and saw how much happier Evelyn had become when the little dynamo had finally crossed the living room floor on her own. That minor triumph, he could see, had been more relevant to Evelyn than mankind’s first tepid steps on Mars. Thousands and thousands of equally insignificant yet crucial moments flashed before his sensors. Moments that Neela would barely remember were some of the most cherished by her avatar. This was the glitch that had stricken his dearest friend. Her fear of loss was an unimaginable anguish that could only be experienced by someone with a lifetime of perfect memory.

“We’ll punch through and restore contact,” Sebastian said, maintaining his calm demeanor. “Whatever’s happening, Evelyn, we’ll do all we can to protect Neela.”

“Easy for you to say,” murmured Evelyn disconsolately. “It’s not Justin who’s in danger down there.”

“Oh, it is, Evy; it is.”

Nadine finally released her sister and stepped back.

“Can’t you see,” pleaded Nadine, “that you’ve been duped by this whole ‘Unincorporated Man’ thing? This isn’t what you used to believe, Neela. You used to argue with everyone at the Thanksgiving table about how stupid the majority party was. Don’t you remember that?”

That’s right, I did.
Neela smiled and then put the thought aside. “Nadine, it’s not about that anymore. Incorporation no longer works. On this very island over a million people have been taken and suspended without any real court approval or thought of the consequences. Two years ago
that
would’ve been impossible.”

“Neela, that’s one million out of a population of six
billion
and, I might add, their suspensions were done during a time of outright civil war. Far worse has been done during the course of history; trust me. I’ll even give you that two years ago this would’ve been impossible, but how can you blame incorporation for that?”