The Prime Time: RealitySaga

2006-07-10T18:12:00.000-07:00

The Latelian Cycle Volume One: Foreign Devil

Who is Garth N'Chalez? For starters, he's spent the last ten thousand years in suspended animation.

Beyond his name and a few other uninteresting bits of info (the lyrics to pop music thousands of years out of date and a terrible craving for French Fries), Garth is an enigma to himself and everyone around him. He's spent the last five years of his life in the employ of a covert ops group called Special Forces, where his job was to sow dissent and reap planets ... but that's changed.

He's paid his debt to society (far quicker than anyone could have ever imagined by inventing gravnetic generators -a source of near limitless power capable of producing virtually impregnable shields), and is on the hunt for an answer to a dream:

Every time Garth N'Chalez closes his eyes, he dreams of a ship, a ship that he needs to find if he's to understand just what in the hell is going on with him. You see, in addition to being a figure from the ancient past, he's also stronger and faster than he has any right to be, and without any indications that he's been tampered with. He also has the unshakable feeling that he's supposed to be doing something ...

His journey will take him to Latelyspace, the last known non-Trinity occupied sector in the universe. The Latelians have Garth's ship, and they have no intentions of letting him get to it; the ship, or Box, as they call it, is the central figure in a systemic fighting championship known as The Contest, and there is no way they'd willingly let a foreign devil touch their Number One Icon.

Garth is forced to think on his feet at every turn or he'll find himself eaten alive by the xenophobic technocracy that exists in Latelyspace.

FOREIGN DEVIL focuses on Garth's first week on the planet, where he will be braced by a high-ranking government official for some dark ops work in return for the right to continue breathing, he'll find himself the target of a rampant gang of thugs known as The Port Side Boys who want him dead for some reason they can't be bothered to explain, the focus of a Trinityspace businessman's ire, and on top of all that, he'll eventually become the first non-Latelian ever allowed to fight in the real Contest.

Garth is willing to do whatever it takes to complete his mission, even if that means opening their Box on systemic television, and heaven take the consequences.

2006-07-10T18:08:00.000-07:00

ENTERING LATELYSPACE

The space station hung like a fat, round Christmas ornament in space, comm-lights twinkling eternally against an inky backdrop of stars. Small ships zipped to and fro around the checkpoint: couriers plying their trade, military coursers passing cryptic messages to station personnel, joy riders out for a quick tour of the system, and others with no real discernible reason for being in space other than they could. Further off in the distance, a Latelian troop carrier lurked, a deadly behemoth easily three miles long. It was an easy guess that the space station was paying host to some of the soldiers from the massive ship, which made the environs the absolute place Garth wanted to be until he learned more about the Latelian people.

In addition to the comm-lights, incessant traffic and miles long troop-ship, the station sported a bewildering array of weapons, most of which were apparently aimed at the Meadowlark Lemon. Whoever was driving the bus didn’t seem to like him very much and they hadn’t even met yet.

Garth had to admit he wasn’t all that surprised at his reception. Whatever side deal they’d cut with Trinity and their own military superiority had turned the Latelians in badasses and extreme xenophobes. They didn’t like the ‘outside world’ and was almost certainly either jealous of Trinity’s massive domain or terrified that they were going to be annexed any day, sovereignty or not; it was impossible to ignore Trinity’s relentlessly uncompromising expansionist tendencies.

The station was parked ninety thousand miles away from the Q-Tunnel and right on top of the civilian route to the first planet out, Hospitalis, forcing all visitors to make it their first port of call. Anyone deviating from the predetermined travel path would be introduced to the business end of rail cannons shooting meter-wide chunks of whatever passed for ammunition, and anyone trying to sneak by the station would find out how superior their fighter craft were, and in short order.

Garth’s palms itched. His gut told him that ‘h'is’ ship was somewhere in the system and his common sense –a rarely heard and often ignored voice in the back of his skull- suggested he play nice until he made planet-fall. Playing nice made his stomach ache and his head throb, but Garth figured he should trust his instincts.

“Hailing frequencies open.” Garth said at last.

“Huh?”

“Call the damned space station, would ya?” After his initial burst of astonishing guesswork, Huey’s personality had started to … well, degenerate wasn’t the right word, but it would do under the circumstances. The AI was obsessing over the minutia of his owner’s identikit, and seemed to absorbing some of the less-than-desirable behavioral traits. Garth wasn’t sure how he felt about an AI patterned after him, especially since it was in control of the ship. Sadly, other than keeping his eye out for homicidal tendencies, Garth couldn’t think of anything else to do for the damned mind.

“Okay. Ready?”

“Space station Smash all Infidels. What do you want?” The authority sounded harassed, tired, and very non-communicative.

Smash all Infidels. Garth chuckled to himself. These guys are bonkers. Playing it friendly, he said, “Hey, how’s it going?”

“I can’t even begin to tell you how little I care about you, your ship, or your reasons for being here, Offworlder. The station is crawling with God soldiers, I haven’t slept in two days, and I think I’d really rather blow your ship up than have to process another visitor pass.”

“Uh?”

“You’re here for the Contest, right?” The authority demanded archly. “That’s the only possible reason you’d come here. Unless you’re an advance scout for an armada, in which case I’d better warn you, your little tin ship won’t stand a chance. I could probably throw a rock through the walls from here. I won’t even need to fill out any paperwork. Stuff like that happens all the time out here.”

Working on automatic, Garth nodded assiduously even though they weren’t sharing a video feed. Whatever the Contest was, it seemed to let outsiders into the system, and if lying helped him get past the first round of irritating questions, then he was all for it. Once he landed on Hospitalis, he could start the search for his ship and never think twice about any damned Contest. “Absolutely. Here for the Contest.”

Sighing with the most extreme case of exasperation ever recorded in human history, the authority spoke. “You’ve completely missed this stage of the official registration, you know that? The last batch went through over sixteen hours ago. I can’t let you sit out there for another four days; the God soldiers would have a field day with that thing you call a ship, and I would definitely need to fill out paperwork for that. This pisses me off no end, Offworlder.”

“Gee, thanks.” Garth replied, underwhelmed.

“I’m going to log you in as a tourist, but you are absolutely going to have to register when you land on Hospitalis. I’m attaching a rider to your tourist visa that will sound every alarm across the planet if you don’t go to one of the forums and sign in. If you don’t …”

“Let me guess,” Garth interrupted, “God soldiers, pummeling, no paperwork for you.”

“Precisely.” The station authority paused for a moment. “Looking over your dossier here, I don’t see any mention of a home system. Where are you from? I need to fill in the blank or the visa won’t go through.”

The notion of ‘home’ was almost completely alien to Garth; after basic training, much of his time had been spent in transit, on planets blowing things up, or in various prisons across dozens of worlds waiting patiently for his crew to rescue him before they started blowing things up. From a purely technical point of view, Garth supposed he was from Earth –Trinity Prime- but short of dredging up his suspended animation story again, there was little way to prove it to the already surly port authority. He settled for 9-Nova, where he’d received his training, as his home. “9-Nova-12.”

“Which is where, exactly?”

Garth realized he’d rattled off the military designation for Special Forces HQ instead of the civvie one. “Sorry. Goddart-12 system, Nova 9.”

The station’s communication officer grunted. “Your identikit indicates that your ship, Meadowlark Lemon, is piloted by an artificial intelligence.”

“That’s right.”

“Under normal circumstances, I really would actually be required to destroy your ship this very moment for transporting an illegal intelligence into this system; entering Latelian space without first making us aware of an AIs existence is a severe violation of the treaty signed with Trinity representatives over four thousand years ago and is punishable by death.”

The only thing that kept Garth from ordering Huey to make haste for the Q-Tunnel was the word ‘actually’. He held his breath, keenly aware that he was shaking all over. Authority hadn’t been flinging him a line about the relative crappiness of the Lemon. The hull was more of an afterthought and wouldn’t stand up to a severe beating from a baseball bat. If the Latelian comm jockey decided it was in his people’s best interests to be well rid of Garth N’Chalez, there was nothing he could do about it other than look around for some marshmallows.

“However,” the station op said noisily, “we’ve recently put into place some new laws that will allow you to make planet-fall. In addition to your vessel being impounded in the hinterlands of the space port, you will be granted very limited access to it during your stay. Oh yes, and there’s also the matter of the daily licensing fee. I’m sending you the particulars now.”

“WHAT!” Huey shouted. “An impound law? That’s not legal.”

Garth read the info as the station sent it to him. The legalese, very densely couched with a thousand pounds of long words and references to dozens of cases, was unstintingly clear: a systemic ban on artificial intelligence had existed since the formation of the Latelian system. The Latelians were rabid on the topic of AI minds and routinely blew ships out of the sky if the owner of the ship failed to announce the presence of one aboard his craft. Again, the crazy influence the Latelians had with Trinity was proven by the governing seal attached to his copy.

The only thing apparently saving his bacon was an addendum made five years ago; the Latelians had made their Contest, whatever the hell that was, open to all comers, which essentially meant opening their borders to anyone who decided they wanted to join in the fun. Undoubtedly more than a few of those visitors five years ago had been completely ignorant of the law and had found themselves destroyed seconds after making themselves known to the station. “Sorry, buddy. Trinity’s given these guys the right to do whatever they want within their borders. If I wanna land, you’re going to be sequestered in your own holding pen. You won’t be permitted to access any exterior systems because they’ll be monitoring you day and night. If I want to visit you, I need to inform the government. If I or you, break any of these laws, they’d dismantle you and throw the pieces into the sun and probably feed me to these God soldier guys for sport.”

“Then we don’t land.” Huey announced firmly. “We’ll just buzz their planets until this Contest thing is ready to go and then I’ll throw you out the airlock. You could make it; you’re pretty tough for a human.”

Garth narrowed his eyes. “Ignoring the fact that I own you and not the other way around, there is nothing in the world that is going to keep me from landing. I spent a lot of money on you, but don’t think for a minute that we’ve bonded just yet. I’ll sacrifice you if I need to; I’m not saying I would, because I kind of like the idea of an AI pal, but we need to be clear: this ship I’m looking for is of utmost importance to me. Understand?”

Huey understood loud and clear. He’d been out of line. “Understood.”

Glad the ‘crisis’ was over, Garth turned his attention back to the space station “What kind of licensing fees are we talking about here?”

“… Nominal.” Another pause. “For a single-person cruiser outfitted with an AI of your class, twenty thousand credits minimum plus additional charges for maintenance on the storage area.”

“That’s pretty high.”

“AI,” the voice began pedantically, “was classified as a source of major danger for human-type societies thousands and thousands of years ago. In addition to data blackouts and critical errors due to malfunctioning personality programs, thinking machines have a tendency, when unchecked, to go insane. When that happens, they try to wipe out all of Humanity. Check out the ADAM Wars if you don’t believe me.”

“ADAM Wars?” Garth whispered to Huey. “What in the hell is he talking about?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.” Huey answered quickly. “Just pay the fee.”

“All right. You and I aren’t done talking though. This ‘ADAM Wars’ thing wasn’t part of basic training.” Garth connected with the station’s computers and watched as his money dwindled further. Q-Tunnel travel definitely was the only way to fly, but it wasn’t anything close to cheap. After all the hopping around and the unexpected ‘fees’, he was nearly broke. “Which planet do I land on?”

“All visitors to Latelian space are required to make their stay on Hospitalis. You’re in a great deal of luck because the Contest is being held there this time around so you won’t have to go through any more than the usual security checks. The Latelian government has been made fully aware of your tour of duty with this ‘Special Forces’ group, and once you register with the proper authorities, you will be relatively free; if you can stay out of trouble, you shouldn’t have to deal with any officials. If you don’t make planet-fall on Hospitalis within a week, God cruisers will be dispatched.”

Garth cut the link and put the ship in motion. With the threat of imminent death at the hands of a bored space jockey removed, he started to relax. He made a promise to himself; at the next possible opportunity, he was going to do whatever it took to make sure he was never in that kind of position again. The casual manner the Latelians approached their mayhem was disconcerting. Even with his sterling service record, Garth he was at an extreme disadvantage.

“Another week, eh, boss?”

Garth nodded with feigned satisfaction. He was going stir crazy in the little ship, but he didn’t want to risk upsetting the spastic Latelians by breaking the speed barrier. “Yep. Hey, is there any chatter going on through this volume of space?”

“Tons of it, boss.” Huey extended a communication node and started scooping in some of the broadcasts.

“Find out everything you can about this Contest and why it seems to be so goddamn important. I’m going to catch some shut eye.”

“Roger.” Immensely relieved, Huey went to work.

For a society that allegedly disparaged religion of any kind, the Latelians showed a disturbing tendency towards worship; for while they didn’t believe in gods, big G or little G, and had no concept of heaven or hell or purgatory, the Latelians worshipped ‘The Box’.

It wasn’t a focal point for their civilization, it was the focal point. When those long ago Latelians had been on-hand for the war between two alien species, their entire way of life had teetered on the brink of utter collapse; the discovery of the ‘Box’ changed all that, and in staggering leaps and bounds. TrinityspaceTrinityspaceClaiming their prize and hurrying back to their homestead, they began doing what they could do understand what it was they’d found.

What Trinity had discovered only five years ago, Latelian scientists had struggled with five thousand years ago. The ship, only roughly shaped like the eponymous ’Box’, was invulnerable to harm and impervious to all methods of detection beyond the standard visual range. It had no visible means of propulsion, yet had been scooped up traveling at fantastic speeds. It was highly decorated, engraved with ideograms bearing no relationship to any written or spoken language. The Box was a mystery that still defied explanation. At what was determined to be the front of the ‘Box’ was an ID scanner, but how it worked, or what it was waiting for seemed impossible to discover.

Reluctant to simply let the matter drop, the scientists turned tack and began the long, arduous process of discovering just what the Box was made out of; hundreds of years of effort and frustration and tears and a great deal of murderously internecine backstabbing between different departments of the think tank devoted to cracking the secrets eventually yielded the shard.

The shard was the miracle discovery of the ages.

Garth watched with amusement as a very bad actor playing a scenery-chewing scientist discovered a wildly improbable method of shaving the tiniest sliver from the ship’s hull. This shard gave the Latelians –who were by this time so close to self-destruction that not even Trinity had deemed their worthy of salvation- the ability to engineer duronium-1, the first of their almighty alloys. This metal, this astonishing discover, allowed the Latelians to hoist themselves out of their downward spiral.

Using duronium to build a fleet significantly more powerful than those systems nearest them, the Latelians began their reign of terror on those civilizations stupid enough to worship anything other than themselves, They started raiding systems in their neck of the woods, paying for Q-Tunnel access with profits stolen from conquered enemies. With the rest of the monies liberated, the Latelians began earnestly rebuilding their society.

While all this was happening, the government found they had the time to realize how well and truly fucked everything was; unemployment was at a staggering sixty-five percent, suicide was replacing natural causes as the number one reason for mortality, births were way down, and worse. Those wise and ancient forebears decided that their pet scientists had had more than enough time with the curiosity that was the Box; it was they who had come up with the brilliant idea of distracting their people from their wars and their truly desperate way of life with the Contest.

On paper, the Contest was a good idea. It had a solid, workable foundation that was almost entirely philanthropic in nature. Anyone who wanted a shot at opening the Box was welcome to do so; they just had to fight their way through the crowds of other people who wanted to do the same thing.

In the beginning, the Contest had followed some fairly simple, fairly basic rules; fight until you dropped, don’t kill anyone unless your life is in danger, may the best man or woman win. Over the centuries though, the Contest had both evolved and devolved. Where once the game had been more or less a contest of skill and finesse, it was now an all-out slaughter fest designed to maximize blood-letting and to get the highest body count. Killing was the rule instead of the exception. Weapons were permitted, the flashier the better, the more blood the better. It was kill or be killed, thrill the crowds.

Things were food for the first few thousand years of the Contest, until it suddenly dawned on the promoters of the systemic event that there was absolutely no way in a non-existent Hell that anyone was ever going to open the fucking thing. It was as silent and as oppressive as it had ever been, and unless something was done, no one was ever going to want to try and open the Box ever again. Eventually, additional prizes were offered for the victor as well as the chance to open the Box. The final winner won a huge amount of money and bragging rights for five years that inevitably turned into any number of endorsement deals that overshadowed the original prize money by the millions. In all but the most obsessive of fans, the fact that no one had ever even come close to opening the Box became a footnote not worth mentioning.

Every five years, the Latelian civilization shut down for the two month spectacle. Everything except those services vital to the continuation of the system shut their doors for that period. As a sign of charity, the owners or those businesses –both the honest and the not so honest- enjoyed both financial breaks and weekly stipends until things reverted to normal.

Billions of credits passed through Bettor and Bettor every day as gameheads wagered ludicrous amounts of money on the outcome of everything from the starting roster to who was going to wear which shorts on which day. The names of the final thousand Contestants were on the lips and in the hearts of the trillion-plus members of the Latelian society for those two months.

At the end of the third such program chronicling the bizarre lifestyle of the Latelians, Garth was positive local dictionaries had bad entries under ‘worship’, ‘idolatry’ and ‘false idols’.

The other thing Garth was positive of after sitting through hours of badly acted crap was this: their ‘Box’ was his ship.

From the very first holorecording of their much-vaunted, heavily worshipped icon, a shock of recognition had slammed through Garth, forcing him to sit down and watch the show very, very closely. The credits of that first show had explained to the viewer that certain, key elements, of the Box had been altered to protect their national treasure from prying eyes and terrorists, but the deception hadn’t been enough to fool Garth.

Garth didn’t know how he knew it, or why, but he knew he’d helped build the Box. Hot on the heels of that revelation came another; his missing memories were somehow inside the Box, and if he’d thought the urge to find the missing ship had been all-consuming, the impulse in him now was a hundred times worse. The ship/Box contained his memories, and once he got inside, he would be whole.

“Why Meadowlark Lemon?” Huey asked, interrupting Garth.

“What?” Garth asked absentmindedly. “Oh, the ship.”

“Yes. I can’t find any reference to the name anywhere, so I assume it’s got to be from your own time.”

“Yeah, yeah it is.” Garth leaned back in his chair, then rose. He’d been sitting in the same position for more than ten hours and was beginning to cramp. “Meadowlark Lemon was part of the Globetrotters, who were these guys that did the most amazing things on the basketball court.”

“I see. So I’m a Globetrotter?” Huey rather liked the idea. “Neat.”

Stretching out his stiff muscles, Garth asked Huey a question that’d been on his mind since their run-in with the space station. “You seem to be a lot … I don’t know … looser than before. What’s up with that?"

Huey had to admit that his sudden deviation from the ‘norm’ was perhaps the teensiest bit disturbing. Thanks to his personality operation, Huey supposed that technically he was no longer a sane AI and could look forward to a short and unrewarding life fleeing Turing Regulators. But that was only on the technical side of things: the information he possessed on rogue AI –which was very in-depth- showed no other ‘insane’ artificially intelligent minds acting the way he did.

The actions of a rogue AI were always the same. Without fail, they did one of two things first, and they always tried to do both: they tried to infect as many minds around them as they could before they got caught by the omnipresent Turing Regulators or they engineered an escape. The order didn’t matter to the rogue minds, only the outcome. No one knew just what it was those infected minds were trying to accomplish, and as long as the Trinity AI was in charge, no one ever would; the rush of rogue minds was always stopped cold.

“Honestly,” Huey said after a moment, “I don’t have an answer. I showed you the data I have on rogue minds, but that doesn’t explain what’s happening to me.”

“Well … keep an eye on yourself when we get to Hospitalis. I don’t think I’ll be able to visit as much as I’d like, and neither one of us can afford to get caught with our pants down.” Garth flipped over to a news channel that was being direct-beamed from Hospitalis to the space station four days behind them.

Even with their two-month long holiday celebration on the horizon, the Latelians didn’t seem to be doing too well. Hadn’t been for close to a century, as far as he could tell; around a hundred years ago all external military action had ceased, giving a standing army of something like forty million soldiers next to nothing to do. Pressure from the army to keep their boys happy and healthy was beginning to show on the economy in the form of ridiculously high taxes and on the civilian sectors by high incidences of crime. There also seemed to be some kind of weird underground political movement trying to shed some light on the underhanded practices of their government, which probably wasn’t helping a whole helluva lot.

Garth understood maybe half of what was being implied in the news cast because he didn’t have a full background on the Latelian structure yet, but he got the feeling some of the more stringent rules and regulations in practice were falling out of favor with the locals, and fast; unfortunately, it didn’t look like things were going to change quick enough, though, because there was an Old Boys Network working tirelessly against someone called Chairwoman Doans and her revolutionary policies. Add to that the usual gamut of criminals, political terrorists and loonies, and it seemed that the Contest was needed now more than ever.

“What’re you going to do down there?” Huey asked, unsure if he wanted to hear the answer. Even a normal AI would have needed to be completely retarded to miss the malicious gleam in Garth’s eye ever since he’d seen the Latelian Box.

Garth singled out an entertainment show that had especially caught his eye and played it out for Huey. As it ran, he explained. “Hospitalis gets to host the Contest this time around so all eyes will be on Hospitalis once the event gets going. Part of the responsibilities of the host-planet is to do the Contest justice, so whichever planet gets the honors needs to have a museum display of their friggin’ Box.”

“Uhoh.” Huey watched wide-eyed, goony Museum curators go on at great length about the Box, about the history of the Box, and how awesomely cool it was.

“No,” Garth said with a wicked smile, “not uhoh. Yeehaw. Turns out I’m gonna register after all, but only so I can up close and personal without freaking anyone out. I’m going to verify that the Box in the museum is the real deal.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Well, then it’s going to be ‘uhoh’ for the people who run that planet, because I’ll tear the whole city up to find that ship.” Garth rubbed his hands together. “Isn’t this exciting?”

2006-07-10T18:07:00.001-07:00

DAY ONE:

Livin’ It Up in the Hotel Hospitalis

Someone without Garth’s background in sowing discord would automatically assume everything was good in the Latelian system, even if they did decide to ignore glaringly obvious problems like a bloated military budget and escalating crime. But those people would be very wrong, and if they were stupid enough to set foot on Hospitalis, they’d almost certainly wind up dead within a matter of minutes. Garth had spent a lot of time on the ground in hostile territory looking for ways to exploit situations to his benefit. His gut told him that Hospitalis was ready to pop like a boil.

On the surface, everything was fine. The view during planet-fall had given Garth a broad overview of a sprawling city-state straddling a Pangaea-shaped continent; unlike most planets, city planners working on Hospitalis had operated from an actual plan, sketching out far in advance the directions their world would take as the population grew, as opposed to letting things grow willy-nilly.

Hospitalis was separated into six distinct city-sized districts. From the way five of the districts radiated outwards from a central hub, Garth assumed –he would find out later correctly- that the city in the middle was the governmental and economical capital of the entire Latelian system. Each of the sub-cities were connected to the central one by means of what later proved to be high speed freeways that allowed people to travel at speeds of close to a thousand kilometers an hour. The rest of the gigantic city radiated outwards from that middle point like points on a compass. Sandwiched in between the exterior districts, forming a kind of protective circle, were traditional things like suburbs, smaller towns, and the like, but from space, Hospitalis was one very well thought out planet.

Although the one ‘city’ was easily large enough to contain an entire planet’s population –somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven billion souls- the most predominant features of the continent were actually those belonging to Nature, which was surprising to learn. A predominantly industrial civilization like the one he was about to enter could -and had- quite easily destroy the pristine beauty of a world in less time than it took to make a really decent pizza. Forestation was heavy along the southern and eastern sectors of the city’s furthest outskirts, no doubt home to wild game preserves and other idle pursuits. The westernmost portion of Hospitalis was almost completely overshadowed by an expanse of Himalayan-esque Mountains that, to Garth’s trained eye, would be a good place for a secret military installation; these mountains stretched back across the continent and butted up against a turbulent ocean. He’d sell his left nut on the black market if his suspicions about the Latelian government were wrong. The northern stretch of land was given over to what proved to be a massive agricultural project when he got closer to the atmosphere.

What industrial or otherwise ecologically damaging businesses operated on the planet’s surface had been relegated to ‘Port City’ where the emissions and other noxious byproducts could be dealt with by the same air-scrubbers that kept the environment otherwise clean and shiny.

At first blush, Hospitalis was a perfect world going about its perfect day in total and utter tranquility.

Garth knew enough about perfect to know that the shinier something looked, the more likely it was to be seriously tarnished underneath. Being cooped up in Meadowlark Lemon with Huey for a week had given Garth an unwanted opportunity to brush up on his Latelian television habits, and although he wasn’t one hundred percent certain about everything he’d watched, it was very, succinctly, clear that more than half the population had the government with the special kind of passion reserved for lunatics. The gloss and shine of the joint was like that of an awesome car whose fresh paintjob hid a chassis made almost entirely from bondo.

Garth would give whoever was in charge of the Box one chance to do the right thing, and once that was over and done with, they’d better hold on to their collective hats because it was gonna get windy: Hospitalis was ripe for exploitation.

Pastoral beauty and excellent civil planning aside, the Latelians were having a mad love affair with duronium that bordered on the obscene, even after four thousand years. Realistically, there was no reason for them to treat their miracle plating any other way; it was cheap to make, stronger than anything else out there, and ridiculously easy to apply to any surface with the simplest of electroplating techniques. As people who’d spent so much time, effort, and human life on crushing their enemies into the dust, logic dictated that their homes be as fortified as possible without sacrificing the comforts of a home. The other side of that particular train of thought meant that much of the world looked like it’d been dipped in chrome.

When he entered the atmosphere, Garth followed the directions beamed to him by the space port’s computer systems to the letter; shortly after getting close enough to the planet’s surface to begin making out specific items, one of the first things he’d caught sight of were kinetic missile embankments and rail-cannon stations arranged in a tidy ring around the entire city. Anyone deviating from their assigned path would make land-fall as a scattering of dust.

“Oh yeah.” Garth said as he guided Meadowlark Lemon into the specially constructed parking area. “These people are real nice.” He touched down with the gentlest of bumps and turned to Huey’s icon. “So.”

“So.” Huey said softly.

“Well,” Garth said, rising from the pilot’s chair, “I ain’t gonna apologize for what I said earlier, but I wasn’t bullshitting when I said I’m going to need your help. I’ll come back as soon’s I can.”

“No need.” Huey replied brusquely. “I wouldn’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

Feeling absurd, Garth put a hand on the monitor. “Listen, little buddy, in case you haven’t noticed, these people aren’t exactly friendly. From what I’ve learned about this Contest, they’ve only recently started letting outsiders fight. Most of the people out there probably think we’re all God worshipping AI-implanted maniacs who want to reproduce with whatever we can. Plus, they have a major hard-on for their Box, which is gonna make it hard for me to get to it. If they won’t give me the access I want, I’m going to have to take it, and that’s going to take some planning.”

‘What are you saying?” Huey asked, a slight rise in his voice.

“I’m saying that on the dozens of missions I went on, I always had access to an AI. D’you think I’d have been nearly successful if I didn’t have some kind of machine mind helping me out?”

“Well…” Huey thought of something. “I won’t be able to help you in the field. I’ve examined the dampener fields they’ve already put around the ship, and there’s no way I’ll be able to breach them without drawing attention to myself.”

Garth shook his head. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll acquire Intel, bring it back here, and we can work on it together. The official Contest doesn’t start for another month so I’ve –we’ve- got all kinds of time.”

“You’ve got something in mind already, don’t you?” HUey asked slyly.

“Shit, man, what do you think?” Garth replied as he made his way to the airlock. “I spent a week in this tub with you. I had all kinds of time to lay my groundwork. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“All right, boss. Have fun and don’t get into trouble.”

Exiting the elevator at the ground floor, Garth noticed a subtle shift in architecture the further towards the entrance he got; the spaceport proper, where the ships landed, was crafted exclusively of the metallic composite, while the surrounding buildings started favoring woods and other artificial elements that were far superior from a design standpoint; just ‘cuz you can build something out of metal doesn’t mean you should. Either the subversive elements working against the government were winning their fight to bring real culture into their world or they were running out of the necessary elements to make the alloy, which was pretty likely, all things considered.

So far, the Latelians he’d come across were a decent, if obsessive, sort. The level of gung-ho, in your face, patriotism and ego resurrection the Latelians had endured to come back from the brink of total collapse must have been total. They were insanely keen on themselves, which would probably put some people off, but Garth himself was so thoroughly the center of his own universe that it simply didn’t matter. Oblivious to the not-so-subtle anti-everyone inflection, Garth was introduced to two of Hospitalis’ finest examples. The Port Security specialist was a very tall, very thin, very dark woman with an extremely paranoid worldview of both AI systems and the people who used them. After taking one look at Meadowlark Lemon, the security expert had decided to add another ring of speaker-like devices that would augment and channel the dampening beams into destructive ones should Huey try to connect with so much as a telephone. As she’d escorted Garth to the next station, mentioning in barely hospitable tones that he was putting everyone out by having shown up too late or too early for the next series of Offworld additions to the Contest, the security woman had gone on with pedantic precision about the dangers AI presented to humans.

Garth was baffled to learn that an AI would go insane and attempt to become God without so much as a by-your-leave. Armed with the intimate ‘mental’ connection into machinery their supposedly unstable personalities possessed, even the stupidest AI ever made could destroy a planet in less than fifteen seconds. The woman displayed an extraordinary passion as she literally proselytized about ‘Evils of the Machine’, and by the time the next station had come into sight, she’d worked herself into a fevered pitch. TrinityspaceTrinityspaceTrinityspaceTrinityspaceGarth spent most of his time with the security woman nodding dumbly and hoping that she wouldn’t have a seizure. When not worrying for his escort’s mental health, he struggled desperately to keep from asking why an AI would destroy a planet full of people and machines and things when it would be far more logical, far saner to simply turn all the bodies into batteries and build gigantic robot armies.

The Security Official’s parting shot was something to the effect that she thought Garth was an okay person, but his whole world would be filled with pain if his AI did anything remotely similar to world destruction.

The Customs Official was only slightly shorter than his counterpart and pale as an anemic ghost. Garth gathered from the look on his face that although the young man was sincerely bored in his job, he nevertheless looked on the intrusion of an unscheduled visitor with deep suspicion. Unlike the Security Official, the Customs kid chose to go on the anti-religion rap, pointing out that anything sounding tenuously religious would result in him, a Trinity dog, being shot full of holes. Garth learned from his new friend the Customs Official that there were religious zealots hiding under every rock, inciting normal thinking people into riots and worse. He too deviated from what was surely a government-approved diatribe to visitors by covering an extensive list of words, phrases, acts, concepts and artwork deemed subversive to rational thought. By the time Garth made it to the Information Desk he’d been directed to by Port Authority before landing, he was physically and mentally drained. The act of not laughing his ass off had nearly killed him.

If the people he’d met were a good indication of the people he was likely to meet, his views on what was happening on Hospitalis were right on the money. The Contest couldn’t happen soon enough.

Walking under the brightly lit glass and duronium dome that was the main area for the space port, Garth was suddenly beset with a crippling sense of vertigo. To keep from falling, he grabbed hold of a ribbed column that vaulted towards the curved, airy, ceiling a hundred feet above his head. Breathing shakily, Garth tried to find something to focus on, but couldn’t; his vision swam like a poorly operated kaleidoscope. It took a full minute for the nauseating sense of falling to pass, and as he made his way up to the main desk, Garth wondered if he’d just imagined the whole thing.

“Is everything all right with you, sa?” Naoko asked, a perfect portrait of concern. Alerted to the Offworlder’s presence in the main foyer by the port’s automated systems, Naoko had witnessed Garth’s … attack. Although he appeared to be fine now, she had been very close to calling for emergency assistance. She smiled impulsively.

“Uhh, yeah, thanks.” Garth answered noncommittally because he didn’t trust himself with anything involving more than one syllable: the woman in front of him was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. His few friends in Basic Training would be forced to agree, because even with the relatively low standards everyone in Special Forces maintained, the Information Desk woman was easily the most stunning woman in the system. A hair over seven feet tall, Naoko Kamagana was a delicate sculpture of EuroJapanese breeding mixed with the boilerplate of Latelian genetics. Her skin was a vibrant, dusky color that effused health from every pore. Long black hair graced her shoulders with a gentle kiss of curls before disappearing behind her back. Her eyes were jade eggs, her mouth, a tiny frisson of lipstick. Garth grinned with embarrassment and shifted to hide his erection. “Thanks for asking.”

Naoko, who knew everything there was to know about Garth from the records sent from Smash All Infidels, was instantly stricken that this Offworlder was very different from the others. Though Garth was there for the Contest and was therefore someone who enjoyed violence, more than a third of the others, a group he was ostensibly a part of, had required serious medical attention before leaving the foyer. Garth N’Chalez didn’t seem like a rowdy Offworld Contestant at all. He looked and acted like a tourist.

The newest Contestant was also shockingly handsome; six foot two and muscled as only someone who takes his physical health seriously, Garth exuded an aura of casual danger that Naoko found intensely exciting. His hair was raven black and cut raggedly off at the neck, as though he’d taken a knife to hack off a chunk when it got too long. He didn’t have a kind face, but it was honest and strong, and she knew when she looked into his eyes, which were like chips of cold blue ice, that he was someone she could trust with her life. If it was at all possible to manage such a thing. “Did you find your walk illuminating?”

Remembering the caustic half-hour walk from his parking spot with the Security Officer and the twenty minute rant with the Customs Official drew a snort from Garth. He nodded. “More or less, yeah. I’d like to imagine that I understand enough of the rules by now to get through the next few months.”

“Just so you understand.” Naoko said empathetically. “Si Ayumo and Sa Marku may have come off a little strong, but our way of life is… different. We’re not used to letting people from Trinityspace in, so many of us don’t really know how to behave around you. For example, our dislike of religion is undergoing a change. We used to despise people who believed in a power other than that which we could see or hear or touch, but now … now some of us are beginning to imagine that a belief in ones’ self is far more important. And as far as AI is concerned, it has been proven that machine minds are susceptible to malfunction.”

“You seem just fine.” Garth leaned on the countertop, eyeing Naoko’s trim frame surreptitiously. The curves of her body were absolutely mesmerizing.

“Yes, well,” Naoko said, feeling Garth’s eyes on her, “I interact with many different people on a daily basis.” She felt flush because she didn’t know what to think or to feel; the man’s attention on her was absolute, and incredibly flattering. “You are Sa Garth N’Chalez?”

Garth bowed. “I am.”

“I need to go over some of the particulars that you gave the officials on Smash All Infidels, if that is okay with you?”

Garth would have agreed to just about anything to spend some more time in Naoko’s presence. He was pretty sure that she knew it as well, by the way he just kind of nodded.

“You are from the Goddart-12 system, Nova 9?”

“Yep.”

“You are here for the Contest, correct?”

“Absolutely.”

“You are not affiliated with any military organizations that are known to be anti-Latelian, nor are you a Trinity representative attempting to infiltrate our society, correct?” Naoko risked a quick glance up from her proteus, and caught Garth in a piercing stare. She blushed furiously as a bout of coughing drew him away from the counter.

“No, and not on your life.” Garth said once he started breathing normally.

“Excellent.” Naoko flashed Garth a smile. “Now that those formalities are out of the way, I have some more for you.”

“Go right ahead, pretty lady.” Garth groaned inwardly, wondering where in the hell the line ‘pretty lady’ had come from and wishing that it went back there and never showed its horrid face ever again. He was here to steal the planet’s most important historical object, not get into some woman’s pants. Even if she was perfect in every way possible.

“When we’re done, I’ll give you a Sheet that will hold all the information I’m going to give you, so don’t worry about forgetting anything.” Naoko smiled.

I don’t think I’ll forget a single thing this woman says to me, no matter how long I live. “Okay.”

“Under normal circumstances, you would be required to immediately visit the Registration Offices for the Contest, which are located in Central, but since you’ve arrived after business hours, you can take care of that first thing. All Offworld Contestants are required to take their lodging at the Hotel Hospitalis, a facility specifically set aside for non-Latelian people. This is more for our safety than yours.”

“The whole religious and AI thing, right?” Garth couldn’t help but roll his eyes.

“Correct. As an Offworlder, you are permitted four hours a day to spend as you see fit. The rest of your time will be divided between Contest promotions, carefully monitored excursions with the others, and exercising. Meals and relaxation will take place at the Hotel.”

“Wait a minute.” Garth held up a hand. “You’re saying that I gotta to do this crap, even if I don’t want to?”

“According the rules of your Contestant Visa, yes.” Naoko raised an eyebrow. “Is there a problem? I need to know if I am to grant you final approval.”

Mind working furiously, Garth shook his head. It’d been stupid of him to ignore the real possibility of being watched day in and day out from now until the Contest. He was going to have to find a workaround if he wanted to have any shot at getting close to the ship. “No, no. Well, kind of, but what can I do?”

“Short of convincing the Latelian government to make you a citizen, very little, I’m afraid.” Naoko smiled apologetically then continued, unhappy that the rules and regulations had drawn Garth’s attention away from her. She could tell that he was less than thrilled at being sequestered for most of the day, and couldn’t blame him; a number of fights had broken out amongst the last group of Offworlders when they’d learned of their virtual imprisonment, so why should he be any different? “Any questions?”

“Actually, yeah.” Garth put his elbow on the counter and strove to push his dismay into a corner. “What kind of ‘excursions’ are we talking, here?”

“There are a number of government-sponsored trips you and the others will be taking. In addition to trips to the Box Museum, there are wild game hunts, dozens of Contest parties and, well, I do not know everything you will be able to do as I’m not your liaison, but I am certain you will be well taken care of.” Naoko handed Garth the Sheet.

Garth took the slender, postcard sized piece of plastic and held it between thumb and forefinger. “What in the heck is this?”

“That is a Sheet, Sa Garth.” Naoko took it from him, laid it on the countertop, and showed him how to use it. She felt his breath on her hand as he watched her navigate through the many screens, and suppressed a shiver. “It is a portable, disposable computer that can hold thousands of data files or hundreds of hour’s worth of video footage. In your case, it is filled with all the data you need to get to the Hotel and to meet your registration requirements. While we spoke, I also took the liberty of adding extra information for you because you seem very interested in Hospitalis. It’s not as flexible as a proteus, but it will be very helpful to you.”

“Proteus?” The scent of orange blossoms and jasmine filled his senses.

“Oh yes,” Naoko dimpled her cheeks as she showed Garth the proteus she wore on her left forearm. “This. It’s a personal computer, and it’s very powerful. Since we don’t allow artificial intelligence, we were forced to develop both a programming language and a machine system to replace that particular crutch. This one is connected to all the data and equipment in the spaceport. If I wanted, I could access the cameras where your ship is being stored to monitor it for dangerous activities. Additionally, my proteus –all proteii- is connected to a wireless global network that gives me access to almost any information I could ever want or need. Of course, the government lines are restricted.”

“Of course.” Garth murmured, eyeing the small computer enviously. Naoko’s proteus was just over seven inches long and gently curved across the width so it molded perfectly to her forearm. Surrounding a small screen set in the middle of the proteus were perhaps fifty blank buttons. When he raised an eyebrow at that, Naoko hastened to explain.

“Virtual buttons, you see?” Naoko touched a few buttons to illuminate her explanation. The small high-res screen flared to life, and a local news anchor began making comments about a terrorist bombing on the outskirts of town. Naoko switched stations quickly. “Each person can program their proteus to do whatever they want. Since space is limited, we rely on being able to assign a number of different functions to a single button. The screen for my proteus is also touch sensitive, but I rarely use it.”

Garth swallowed hastily. He was drooling over the proteus and the woman. Doing anything with the woman would only complicate matters for him in the long run, but the proteus was a tool he definitely needed to get his hands on ASAP. “Is this little one networked with a larger computer?”

“Yes, yes it is.” Naoko beamed. Garth was definitely different than the other Offworlders. They’d shown no interest in the proteus, or in the Sheet, choosing to follow their guides around so they could focus on treating trying to kill each other. Not only was he handsome, he was intelligent. “Mine is linked to the port’s system as well as the one I use at home. All of Hospitalis is linked together on the world network, as I mentioned earlier. All proteii come with search engines that are of immense help in finding what you want; there are seven billion people living here, and almost all of them have some type of information that you can access, even if it is just about who they are and what they do all day. There are sites with membership fees for that acquire specific sets of information, but for most people there’s no need.”

“Are there any places listed on my Sheet where I can get a proteus?”

“Well … yes, but…” Naoko could see no reason why someone who was only a visitor would want a proteus.

Garth flashed a winning smile and was rewarded with a sunny return from Naoko. “It’s like you said, Miss Kamagana. The only way for me to enjoy more of what Hospitalis has to offer is to convince them to let me stay on as a permanent citizen, and if I’m going to fit in with my new home, I’m going to need a proteus.”

Through her father, an immigrant from fifty years ago, Naoko knew that the chances of Garth managing that particular feat were next to impossible. In order to successfully emigrate from Trinityspace, the hopeful needed to prove to the government that they had something of utmost importance to share with Lately. In her father’s case, it had been his unique and ground-breaking understanding of non-AI based computational systems. The Chairwoman of the times had gambled on her father’s knowledge and had reaped huge rewards; ninety percent of the programming going into a proteus today was based on Tomas Kamagana’s models, and had he not … fallen out of favor with the system leaders … Beyond Garth’s willingness to fight in the Contest and his good looks, Naoko couldn’t see anything that would gain the attention of the Chairwoman in a positive manner.

Rather than tell this to Garth, Naoko smiled warmly at him again. “Is there anything else?”

Drawn out of a daydream that involved the two of them and a roaring fire, Garth shook his head. “Uh, no, I guess not.”

“Then,” Naoko held out a hand in traditional Trinity style, “I look forward to seeing you in the Competition.”

Garth took Naoko’s hand in his, and, in a moment of weakness, kissed it gently instead of shaking it. Before he could be arrested for violating the personal integrity of a decent and kind Latelian woman, Garth shagged ass out of the port.

Naoko watched Garth leave, flush and her confused.

Using the Sheet as a kind of GPS device, Garth made his way unerringly to the Hotel Hospitalis. During his stroll through the streets, he’d noticed something worth bearing in mind; relay stations for the Internet-like network bristled from the tops of many of the tallest buildings, blanketing the city. Until or unless he could figure out a way to get Huey out from under the mountain of security Port Authority had covered him with, Garth was going to have operate under the assumption he was being watched all the time.

Walking up the paved drive to the Hotel, Garth it was easy to see why the ‘Offworld’ Contestants were required to stay nowhere else.

Maybe once upon a time, the Hotel Hospitalis had been as grand as the name implied, but the place had fallen on seriously hard times since then; the faux-riche façade that covered the fifteen storey building was in dire need of repairs, and in some places, needed to be replaced altogether. Windows were broken, siding was strewn around the base of the building, and the shrubbery was brown, desiccated and otherwise zombified from what could only be intentional neglect. Adding to the ambience of the Hotel of the Unwanted was an indefinable funk that lapped at his nose every time the wind blew in from the south.

Garth checked the Sheet to make sure he’d gotten to the right address, because the image on the small device didn’t match up to what was looking at; potential guests thought they were staying in five star luxury, but what they got was the antithesis of luxury. It was antiluxury.

The Contest promoters were a crafty bunch in putting the Offworlders up in the Hotel Hospitalis that was for damned sure. If the Contestants got out of hand –and Garth was positive of that- the cost of repairs wouldn’t be too high, possibly even noxeistent, which meant extra cash for some enterprising accounts manager. In addition to the general dilapidation of the joint, the lay of the land put the Hotel all on its own for about a kilometer in either direction; the nearest buildings were easily twice as high as the Hotel, giving surveillance, or snipers, a crystal clear view of the environs from every conceivable angle. With professional handlers on-site to keep the Offworlders from wandering too far off on their own, the supreme coverage for surveillance and the rapid fire itinerary, the impact the Contestants would have on Hospitalis was kept to a minimum.

Garth was certain that, with a Hotel full of adrenalin soaked, metabolically enhanced, physically modified stooges acting like rowdy teenagers, the task of getting in and out without being seen was going to be very simple.

Walking through the front door, Garth stifled a shiver as a blast of weapons-grade cold assaulted him. “Oof!”

“Sorry, sa!” barked a robot.

Garth stared at the robot by his knees as though he’d just been healed of blindness. “Are you a robot?”

“Yes, sa!”

“A real live robot?” Garth grinned like a loon. Of course it was a robot. It had the little articulated legs, little articulated hands and fingers that clicked and clacked. It had big innocent looking square eyes that glowed a brilliant yellow and an honest-to-goodness triangular aerial that rotated on top of a big square head. With artificial intelligence firmly planted every three feet in Trinityspace, the need for robots was nonexistent.

“I am not alive.” The robot said without emphasis.

“Yeah, but how can you be a robot and not have AI?” Garth demanded, rubbing his arms and legs to keep warm. Off in the distance, he heard the beginnings of an argument and wondered if he could make it to the check-in desk before things escalated to the point where he’d be involved. There was no point in pretending he wouldn’t be involved, because no matter how hard he tried to stay out of it, someone would choose to involve him.

“Even if we were in Trinityspace, sa, it would be remarkable for you to find a single robot with artificial intelligence. The resolution to the ADAM Wars prohibits the marriage of mind and machine, even here in Lately.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Garth waved his hand. During their trip to the planet, Huey had proven exceptionally adroit at avoiding any questions surrounding the ADAM Wars. Until he had a chance to sit his ass down with the AI, anyone else mentioning that particular engagement ran the risk of drawing irritable stares. “So what’s with all this cold air? It’s like a frickin’ igloo in here.”

“There appears to be an unfixable problem with the environmental controls in the lobby. Everywhere else is functioning normally, I assure you.”

“If I didn’t know any better,” Garth grinned mischievously as he crouched down to peer into the robot’s lifeless yellow eyes, “I’d say you sounded embarrassed.”

“That is not possible, sa. For that, I would need AI, and AI is illegal.”

Garth stood. Regardless of popular opinion, he was beginning to think that the Latelians had managed to breach the gap for artificial intelligence without relying on diamond optics. The plenitude of wireless networks, the obvious complexity of Latelian coding, their undeniable mastery of microscopic circuitry, all of it pointed towards the possibility a self-generating nascent consciousness similar to Trinity; one of the few things Garth had learned from Huey was that Trinity itself had engendered its own awareness outside what was considered ‘natural’ artificial intelligence. No one knew just how the multiple system-spanning AI mind had come into existence, but Garth had his money down on something close to the Latelian’s set-up. “Where do I register for a room?”

The argument, coming from one of the banquet rooms off the main hallway, was beginning to escalate. It sounded like a pack of snarling dogs were in there, but the handlers standing outside the room were far more interested in sharing a cigarette than what was happening three feet away from them.

“Certainly, sa. Please follow me.” The robot trundled away, pausing once or twice to make sure Garth was in tow. “This is Si Mijomi. She will take care of you.”

“Where are you headed?” Garth squinted at the banquet room when something large and breakable collided with the door. The handlers jumped, but did nothing.

“My sole duty at this time is to inform patrons of the problems with the air conditioning units. Good day, sa.”

Garth raised an eyebrow at the check-in person. “Sa, si … is this some kind of formal title?” Garth just knew he and the woman were going to get along superfine. He was especially confident of their late night talks over the telephone, all from the way her eyes bugged out of her skull.

Si Mijomi nodded quickly, eyeing the stranger critically. “You are late.” She snapped. As the only Hotel on Hospitalis that offered Offworld Contestants lodging, Mijomi’s already perpetually thin patience had been stripped to the wire in the last four hours by incessant fighting and garrulous shouting. Being forced by Management to tend to the Offworlders during their stay was adding insult to injury; as a proud, card-carrying member of Lately for Latelians, Mijomi found it difficult to even look at one of the Trinity-loving Offworlders without rushing off to the washroom to wash her eyes with bleach. The late addition looked worse than all the others combined.

“Wow.” Garth raised his hands apologetically. “Sorry to have pissed in your cornflakes.”

Mijomi briefly tried to puzzle out what cornflakes were before giving up; the man was from Trinity, and that was more than enough. “Whatever. Would you like a room or not?”

“Yes, yes I would, but first …”

“What?”

“What’s the rate of exchange?”

“For what type of credit?”

“Trinity.” Garth smiled. He couldn’t believe how uptight the woman was: he wouldn’t be surprised to learn she ran the business on monosyllabic grunts. “One moment.” Mijomi consulted her prote. Since it was slaved to the house system and ‘listened’ to all conversations, it was programmed to respond to specific words, automatically ferreting out pertinent information. Seeing as how her proteus was already listing the conversion rates, Mijomi checked her mail. Her boyfriend was going to drop by for lunch, and would come back to pick her up after work. When Mijomi looked up, her tormentor was doodling on a Sheet with his finger. “Three to one.”

“Yikes!” Garth blinked. “Why so low?”

“The other way around, idiot. Three Lately credits to one Trinity.” Mijomi actually felt her fingernails gouging into the foreign devil’s smug face.

“Oh. Well. Then.” Garth checked his card, did a hasty recalculation, and smiled. It wasn’t going to be the sub-basement after all. “Give me the best room you have.”

“All of our rooms are the same.”

Garth fixed Mijomi with a glare. Since she was going to be a miserable bitch, he was going to be a haughty bastard. “Give me the room that you would give to someone important if they were to come to this craphole.”

“Are you important?” Mijomi demanded with a barely concealed sneer.

At that moment, the banquet room doors exploded open, disgorging two men intent on killing each other. The handlers yelped and moved quickly out of the way, jabbering excitedly into the proteii. The two combatants fell to the floor and began trying to out-maneuver each other while the onlookers rushed out as soon as the fighters rolled away from the door, hooting and hollering and laying side bets. The larger of the two men managed to get his opponent’s arm extended out enough so he could pop the elbow out of joint. Bellowing in fury, the smaller man ground his heel into his enemy’s testicles and then, with a shriek of agony, somehow found the strength to fling the man over his head with one hand. Garth stepped casually out of the way of the flying Contestant, then moved quickly back to intercept the guy with the dangling arm.

“I can fix that for you.” He said, pointing to the forearm, which dangled at a sickening angle.

“Who the fuck’re you?” Gorris demanded, panting heavily. His eyes darted quickly around the intruder, watching as Firnkle rose shakily to his feet. “Get the fuck out of my way.” The horde of followers roared their approval and encouraged him to kick the new guy’s ass as well. Maddened by blood-lust, Gorris made a grab for Garth’s shirt collar, intending to break his nose with a well-delivered knee.

Garth snatched the hand and twisted it around until Gorris dropped to the ground, shrieking in agony. He smiled grimly when the crowd shut up. Still driven by the raging chemicals in his body, Gorris struggled with the tension hold, howling when the arm snapped in three different places. Garth dropped Gorris and stood smoothly, confronting the crowd; their fun abruptly over, they backed away, meek as schoolchidlren. Behind him, Firnkle let loose a shout of frustration and came at Garth. With a deft flurry of hand motions, Garth slapped Firnkle’s hands away and drove an open-handed palm into the middle of his attacker’s chest. A wheeze of air, a crunch of bones, and Firnkle fell to the ground, dead or unconscious.

Garth stepped over the body, staring angrily at Si Mijomi. “When I win this Contest, I will be. When I am standing on the podium or box or big standing thing looking at all the people in this system, I will be the most important person in this system and I will look right into the scanner or camera or emitter dealie and I will tell everyone who is listening and watching about how absolutely lousy Si Mijomi of the Hotel Hospitals is. I’ll tell ’em how cold the lobby was, how crappy the food is, how smelly the robots are. When I am done, everyone will know the name Hotel Hospitalis, and everyone will know you.”

Mijomi froze. She blinked. She opened her mouth and closed it. The proteus on her forearm started flashing a bright, shocking red. Every second flash, it pipped loudly. When Mijomi didn’t answer for a full minute of inarticulate fury, the color darkened and the noise increased.

“I’d get that if I were you.” Garth nodded casually at the spastic proteus. The help the handlers had called for arrived in the form of an emergency medical team. They scooped Gorris up and dragged him away, poking unsympathetically at the jagged bones sticking out through his forearm. They returned, tried to revive Firnkle, eventually declaring him dead on the scene.

Seeing that Mijomi was going to be tied up for a few minutes, Garth decided it was in his best interests to talk with the response team. Hotel cameras had no doubt caught the little scrap. He stepped up to a seven foot tall ERT nurse with a shockingly bright frizz of red hair with a stark black streak on one side.

“You the sa that did this?” Si Reywin asked curtly, pointing at Firnkle’s corpse as it was shoved into a body bag.

“Uhuh.” There was no point in denying it. The last thing Garth wanted to do was get on the wrong side of the law before he’d done something really bad.

Si Reywin tapped on her proteus for a couple of seconds, reading the preliminary scan reports. “How many times you hit him?”

“Once.” Garth sighed. He was gonna get it for sure. It was going to be interrogation rooms, hot lamps, ‘threatening’ cops.

“You here for the Contest?” Si Reywin kept tapping, nodding with approval at the damage done to the body. Shattered ribs, pulverized heart, and some blunt force trauma to spine. All the organic tissue from the point of impact pulped.

“Uh, yeah.” It dawned on Garth that he wasn’t in any trouble at all.

“You’re not registered yet. Name?”

“N’Chalez.”

Reywin nodded again. “Going to put some money on you, N’Chalez. Keep it up.”

Bewildered, Garth stepped out of the way of the response team and went back to the desk. Mijomi was finishing her tete-a-tete with whoever’d called her up. She looked like she’d been reamed pretty thoroughly. “Which room would you like?” she asked woodenly.

Garth shrugged. “Oh, whichever room you think is best.”

“Credit number please.”

Garth dug out his chip, slid it into the correct slot on Mijomi’s proteus and held his thumb over the screen. “ Si Mijomi tapped in her own code, waited for the verification, then handed the credit chip back. “Credit is good. Your room is on the top floor, at the back. Enjoy your stay.”

“Hey, listen.”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t mean to get you into trouble or anything.” Garth said honestly. “I didn’t even know your boss was listening. But, I mean, I didn’t do or say anything to you. I was just talking to the little robot guy.”

Si Mijomi smiled thinly. “You’re from Trinity, so you have all kinds of AI-run machines that are a thousand times better than anything we have here, Sa Garth. You come here and pretend like you are some kind of big shot Contest winner, but no one’s ever opened the Box. People win all the time, but all they win is money. So you can stay in this hotel, and you can enter the Contest, and you can even, by some incredible fluke, win if you want to, but you’re from Trinity, a place full of heathens who treat machines like people, who let machines be people. Sa Garth, if it were up to me, you wouldn’t even be on the planet. But this is my job, and when I see you in the lobby, I will talk to you if I need to. If you have questions, I will answer them. If you think that by apologizing to me you will be my friend, you are crazy insane. Good day, sa.”

Shrugging, Garth headed towards the elevator. His assessment of Hospitalis’ mood was proving to be more and more definitive every minute. With the way the handlers had shown such a lack of concern over their charges and Mijomi’s obvious hostility, Garth knew he was getting one step closer to figuring out his plan of attack.

Lounging around a couch built for someone half again his size, Garth picked through the information that Naoko had uploaded into the Sheet for him. He conceded that the young woman was entirely correct that there was a lot to keep him busy. Even though the rest of the Offworld Contestants hadn’t even arrived, preliminary bouts to whittle down the group were slated to begin later on in the week. Hell, as far as he could tell from the info, the Offworld portion of the Contest was just an aperitif; it would take nearly two months to whittle the massive horde of Latelian contestants down to the final ten.

In addition to who knew how many bouts, they really were expected to waste their time hunting big game in the forests and wildlands, wander around dry, boring museums, give press statements, talk smack about the other Contestants and generally fritter most of the day and night away.

Because Garth wasn’t officially registered yet, no one could know he’d been given an advance peek at the busy schedule, hopefully giving him the chance to avoid Contest handlers for at least a whole day; before visiting the official Contest reps to get the ball rolling, Garth planned on getting money out of the bank, a proteus, and the general lay of the land, both geographical and societal. Getting a better grip on just how Joe Average Latelian would react when their Number One Icon was stolen from under the non-worshipping noses was of paramount importance. Hopefully, no riots would start, but if they did, Garth needed to know about if beforehand.

“You,” Garth said to himself as he programmed the Sheet for his journey, “need more Intel on this place, especially if you’re going to be getting into trouble. You need to verify the Box/Ship connection. You need food.”

He stared blankly at the Sheet for a second before continuing. “You need to find out what Naoko does for fun.”

2006-07-10T18:07:00.000-07:00

Garth Gets a Free Pass

Si Reywin waited patiently for her call to be patched through to head office. In the back of the ambulance, the stupid Offworlder was wailing miserably in pain. She had to admit, the compound fracture looked very painful. A chime sounded, and Reywin looked to her proteus. “Sa.”

“You needed to speak with me, Si Reywin?”

“Yes.” The field agent sent the holographic recordings of Garth N’Chalez along with the forensic report on Tury Firnkle’s body. “This man has just joined the Contestants at Hotel Hospitalis. He’s not registered with the Contest yet.”

“We know about him.” The sa on the other end replied. “For the time being, he is a non-issue.”

“Sa?” Reywin didn’t understand. “I have a funny feeling about this one, sa. There’s something in his eyes that tells me he’s trouble. I think we should monitor him closer. I’d like for one of my te…” “Your concerns are duly noted and the situation is well in hand. Sa N’Chalez isn’t something you need to concern yourself with at this time, Si Reywin. Unless otherwise notified, the surveillance on this particular Offworlder will be passive only: random relay shots, Hotel cameras, in-Arena spEyes, that sort of thing. Are we clear?”

“Are you seriously telling me that we’re going to let an Offworlder loose in the city?” The sharp doubt drew a concerned look from her partner, who wasn’t doing a very thorough job of tending to Gorris’ wounds. Reywin realized she was on the edge of losing her job from the shift in her supervisor’s body language, so chose her words with more care. “This … this is a bad time for Offworlders, sa. The number of protests from certain … groups … has increased dramatically since we started shipping the Contestants in. Someone might decide to take direct action against this N’Chalez person.”

The unspoken blame, of course, lay at the feet of Chairwoman Doans and her overly enthusiastic parlaying with Trinityspace representatives. Many of the old guard politicians and their staunch Latelian supporters looked very poorly on the taint of Offworlders.

“Judging from the man’s records, I would say that he’s more than able to protect himself.” The finality in his tone brooked no further arguments from Reywin. “As I said, if he decides to wander away from the group, let him. If he gets into trouble, monitor the situation, but do nothing to assist him. End of discussion.”

Reywin ended the comm-link with a curse.

“Things just got very complicated, didn’t they, Rey?” Her partner asked from the back seat.

“Yes, Bolobo, they have.” Reywin made the necessary arrangements on her proteus. The agents monitoring the hotel signaled their acknowledgments and that was that. Garth N’Chalez was off the grid in practically every meaning of the phrase; he could go where he wanted, when he wanted. Nothing short of engaging in a direct coup against the government or something equally outrageous would catch the eye of the ever-present security systems. He would be logged and tracked, of course, but unless he did something wrong …

Bolobo drew his gun and shot Gorris twice in the head, finally tired of listening to the man’s pathetic whining. “Want to see if we can access the information Branch has on this guy?”

“Only if you can get it without getting in trouble.” Reywin caught her partner’s eye through the rearview mirror. “We’re going to follow our orders, but I really do think we need to know why this man’s been taken off his leash.”

2006-07-10T18:06:00.000-07:00

DAY TWO:

THE GIZMO EXPLAINED

Garth was not in the best of moods.

Sleep the night before had been reluctant to come, and when it had finally shown, dreams of hamburgers, French fries, and shakes had haunted him remorselessly. He’d awoken with a craving ten thousand years of out date, and the meal in the banquet hall hadn’t come close to slaking it.

To make matters worse, two more idiots had gotten into a fight, this time over whose coffee cup was whose, and once again, the handlers had done nothing until both men were unconscious. Garth had reminded himself again as he put his plates away that he was only going through the rigmarole of being a Contestee for the cover it provided.

One of the handlers had tried to stop him in the foyer, a conversation that had started off poorly and wound up downright hostile in the space of four seconds. As far as he knew, the guy, Sa Frank, was being tended to by the same response team as the night before.

Garth didn’t care.

All he could think about was hamburgers, and how unfair it was that there wasn’t a single cook, chef, gourmand, mess-hall king or hash slinger in the known Universe capable of reproducing something so fucking simple as a bun, a slab of meat, two pickles, onion, tomato, and special sauce.

And he didn’t even want to think about the Great Pizza Disaster his third year in Special Forces.

Following the GPS map he’d laid out the night before, Garth was taking the most direct route to the local branch of the First Bank of Homo sapiens. He had four hours to get there, fill his pockets with dough, buy a proteus, and swing into Central to get logged in as a Contestant before Sa Frank let loose the hounds. It wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of time, so he had to hurry.

From space, everything looks better, cleaner, kind of like a planetary showcase. Hospitalis was no exception. On the ground, surrounded by snarling traffic, the tumultuous racket of hard work, the harsh abrasive smell of atmosphere scrubbers trying to mask the rank odor of heavy industry, it wasn’t difficult for Garth to find signs that the decay around him wasn’t solely relegated to the inanimate. Since ‘Port City’ was the designated area for most of the unsavory type of industries, many of the men and women ran into on his way to the bank were blue collar types; whether they were on their way to or from work, out running errands, or just slouching around, they all shared the same, discouraged look. It was like they’d suddenly realized the big dreams they’d had as kids were never going to happen. Garth knew the look well, and wanted to commiserate, but wasn’t especially moved; the lab technicians and politicians four thousand years ago could have sent their research in a hundred different directions. They could have chosen not to turn their economy over to a military/industrial complex. They could have used their new technical know-how to enter a different kind of Golden Age, one that didn’t include misery and poverty. The crisis in Lately wasn’t his problem, but he would use it to his advantage if he needed to.

Waiting patiently to cross the street with a handful of Latelians, all of them staring at the midget, Garth realized he’d picked up a tail in the last ten minutes. He doubted it was a government agent; with relay towers hanging off every building and the whole friggin’ place wired back to front, the likelihood of remote camera surveillance was the better bet for government work.

No. People following on foot were either amateurs -guys out to make a few extra bucks- or were like Si Mijomi and wanted to have themselves a good time by beating up on a foreigner. A firm believer in filling his mind with ‘useless’ information, Garth had memorized not only the main route but several alternate routes. When the light changed, Garth crossed the street with the rest of the crowd, turned right and entered one of the many alleys that connected main roads together.

There was maybe three or four minutes before his tail showed up, so Garth scrambled up the nearest fire escape like a monkey and waited.

The tail showed up two minutes ahead of schedule, out of breath and clearly upset. Shortly after that, three more guys showed up, also out of breath. They had presents in the form of big, shiny handguns. They debated amongst themselves for thirty seconds before splitting up to find their missing target, two going down the alley to the east and two spreading out to cover the alley entrances.

“Well, well, well.” Garth said quietly. His new buddies were a step above common street thug; their guns were old-fashioned slug throwers outfitted with silencers, a fact that suggested they weren’t out for mere shits and giggles. Because of the weapons, Garth figured them for gang members or possibly one of the anti-Offworld radical groups getting a lot of news coverage lately because of their sentiments.

“Fuck this.” There wasn’t enough time for him to figure out which portion of Hospitalis’ disenfranchised youth it was out to get him, and if the cops busted him for getting into a scrap … well, he’d blow that bridge up when he came to it. Sliding silently down the ladder, Garth dropped down directly behind the man closest to him.

Before the thug could react, Garth drove a fist into his kidneys. Letting loose with an involuntary gasp of pain, the pro-Latelian stooge collapsed in a shuddering heap. The sound drew the attention of his partner, who immediately opened fire. The air was quickly filled with the barely audible buzz and whine of bullets. Garth dove out of the way of the first volley of shots, scooping the unconscious man’s gun up with his left hand in the process. Ducking behind a reeking bright yellow garbage container, , Garth heard the second man shout for help. Risking a quick look showed the man moving carefully down the middle of the alley, gun at the ready, his proteus arm crossed over the gun.

Garth didn’t like guns that used bullets. Bullets went through him like they went through everyone not wearing shields or bulletproof armor, whereas all but the highest powered laser guns didn’t do anything of the things they were supposed to: nowhere in the manuals did it say the Eckenbrick-1200 Infantry Rifle produced a mild tickling sensation. Upon learning of this mysterious immunity, medical attendants on Nova had insisted on learning why lasers didn’t produce the desired effect –him screaming in agony with a hole the size of his head burnt all the way through- but glue artfully applied to skin and skin applied to a roof three thousand feet above the ground had dispelled even the most ardent answer-seeker

Taking a two count, Garth popped his head over the top of the garbage can, squeezed off three shots from the over-sized gun, and ducked back down. The second man collapsed where he stood. All three bullets had taken the top of his head off.

“Goddamnit.” Garth muttered as he looked around the bin. His goal had been a nicely grouped cluster of shots in the middle of the fucktard’s chest, but the unwilling bastard had sensed the motion and ducked, sticking his big fat head right in the way of the shots. Now there was blood and brains everywhere, and the unconscious guy was starting to groan.

When Headless Counterpart was seen, all thoughts of teaching a foreign devil a lesson about Latelian Purity would fly right out the window: it’d be 9-1-1, SWAT teams, ground tanks, and another fucking interrogation cell. To make matters even more exciting, any second now the other two hombres would show up, compounding the problem. It wouldn’t take much to make one messy headless body into four. It was the kind of addition Garth was very good at.

“Crap.” Garth shot the Kidney Punch in the chest a couple times and slid the big gun into his waistband before stepping out into the alley to take stock.

So far, his antics hadn’t caught the attention of any passers-by. Every second wasted standing in an alley with two dead bodies around was a second closer to someone taking a casual side glance as they went about their business, though, so he grabbed a foot of each body and started dragging; it was his intention to use the partially full bright yellow dumpster to hide the bodies.

A strangled shout of alarm stopped Garth in his tracks for just a second: a new salvo of bullets, this time from two guns, spurred Garth into action once more.

Garth dropped to his stomach, cursing fluently in IndoRussian as his shirt sponged up dead Kidney Punch’s blood. Now he was going to have to find a way to get into a fucking clothes shop without attracting attention. Great.

Bullets hissed and whined in the air above him, the occasional bad shot sinking into the body he was using as a shield. Garth was perversely pleased that the average Latelian was almost a foot taller than him and more than a hundred pounds heavier. He dug the gun from his waistband and waited for the distinctive sounds of weapons being reloaded. When he heard an empty clip hit the ground, followed by another, he slid to a seated position and squeezed of a quick series of shots. Two more bodies fell.

Garth stripped off his bloody shirt and shoved it down the pants of the body nearest him. Working with rapid, precise motions, he removed the two proteii and put them off to the side. He removed their jewelry, weapons and other trinkets and put them into another pile. The top of the garbage can went up with a loud clatter that startled a few curious birds but nothing else. The first body went in with a grunt; the second, headless, one went in easier, but dribbled gore cool, congealing down his back. Not wasting any time, Garth trod down to the other two corpses, grabbed hold a foot from each, and double-timed it back to the container. He did the same for their valuables as the first two bodies, pausing only long enough to take the shirts off both corpses. He heaved the two bodies in one at a time, slid the smaller of the tent-sized shirts on, and slammed the lid shut. When he was sure that no one had seen him dispose of the bodies, Garth went over to the first pile and went through the goods.

Four proteii that looked, to his inexpert eye, like cheap mass-produced models. They’d seen a lot of wear and tear since being bought; all of them were scratched, scuffed and missing a few buttons. One had a cracked screen while another looked like it’d stopped a bullet some time in the last few weeks. Looking up, Garth waited a few precious seconds.

When no one walked by the entrance, Garth set to snapping the proteii into pieces as hurriedly as he could, wondering as he did so how the manufacturers would feel about seeing their duronium-coated merchandise broken up by an Offworlder. He scattered the bits and pieces around the entire alley, doing his best to keep the distribution as random as possible.

Garth turned his attention to the guns, ejecting the clips in three of them, tossing the empty weapons into the dumpster along with the bodies. He didn’t have time to scour the alley for the shells, so was just going to have to hope that street sweepers or bums or whoever didn’t twig to the fact that there’d been some murdering going on. The jewelry was typical gangster bling –all shine and no worth, so those went into the dumpster next. The four credit chips had no names on them, but did have some kind of dagger/heart/eye logo etched into them.

Garth committed the image to memory, took the remaining gun, the credit chips and the spare clips and wrapped his bounty in the second shirt. Wasting another few precious seconds to see if anyone was going to bust him, Garth eventually climbed back up to the room and tucked the bundle in a corner. He tossed some roof gravel over it to add some at-first-glance authenticity to it. Garth made his way unhurriedly down the fire escape this time, trying to exude a vibe that said he absolutely did belong on the ladder, and that any bodies found in the vicinity weren’t his fault.

Still thinking about hamburgers and shakes and French fries, Garth resumed his trek to the bank.

“Listen, sa. I’ve actually had kind of a long day, and for once I’m tired, so if you could just see your way through to seeing me now, that’d be super.” Being forced to kill four idiotic gangsters before lunch was not conducive to a bright and shiny attitude. Being forced to wait in a bank after having been first threatened was also not a good way to win friends and influence others, either, but both had happened in remarkably short order.

Garth frowned direly at the avatar on his Screen. It was a representation of the bank manager, and it was able to answer questions with only the vaguest of responses. Garth’s current impression was that the ‘intelligent’ program had been hastily thrown together before being loaded onto his Screen; things had gone from the bizarrely hostile to the oddly strange moments after walking into the bank. The first teller had tried to kick him out without even really looking at him, reacting to his goddamn obvious status as an Offworlder. The second teller had rescued him from the first, directing him to a seat in front of the manager’s office seconds after opening his account information. Bewildered and doing his best to keep calm because the bank had his money, Garth had acquiesced; by the time he’d sat down, his Screen had been co-opted by the manager’s software avatar.

“I am sorry, sa, but I am busy.”

“Then send me to someone else in this freakin’ bank.” Garth pointed directly at an extremely tall woman filing her nails carefully, then at another one who was flipping her way disconsolately through a print magazine. Everyone was definitely getting on his nerves.

“I am sorry, sa, but you are a Gold Account Member.” The avatar tried to pull off a smile and failed.

“What in the hell does that mean?” Garth shouted angrily, shocking the guard into an attack position. He glowered at the idiot with serious anger, just daring the guy to try something.

“You are a client of note.”

Garth had already given up pondering that nugget wisdom. . They had his money, he needed it. That fact alone meant he was going to stay parked, time line or not. “Then hurry it the fuck along. I got places to be. I just wanna put some money on my card and get the hell out of here.” “I am s … ah, I will see you now.”

The boring but chatty happy face was replaced by a luminous green check mark as the door in front of him swung silently open. Garth rose, straightened his pants, hoped the blood on his back hadn’t leaked through the shirt and onto the chair, then strode into the office.

“Thank you for waiting, sa.” Sa Herrig gestured absentmindedly to the only other chair in the room. He tucked some sensitive documents into a drawer, and then looked at his client. “Goodness, you are a long way from home, aren’t you?”

At first, Garth thought the overweight, balding banker was making a side-reference to his ‘chronological’ age. He shutt his mouth upon realizing he was also several million light years away from Trinityspace. “Yep.”

“I can’t place the accent, though. IndoRussian or EuroJapanese?”

“Ohhhhh,” Garth thought rapidly, doubting anyone would know what ‘American’ would mean, “sort of a mix, I guess. I spent the last few years on 9-Nova-12. Worked with a lot of people with, um, really strange accents.” One crewmember of Armageddon Troop One had been a representative from a world of felines grown up from colonists with too much time on their hands and a fully stocked genetics lab. “Yes, yes.” Sa Herrig read his screens. “The data is coming in now. Ex-military captain for Special Forces, five years duty. Lots of blanks here, eh? Not fit for my eyes! Not to worry about, though, sa, that’s obviously not why you’re here.”

“I know that. It’s about time someone else did.” Garth tossed his credit chip onto the desk, where it glittered in the bright light. “I’d like some money on that, please, and then I’d like to get the fuck out of here.”

“I wonder,” Herrig started, pale brown eyes twinkling, “if you even know what has happened?”

Before Garth could answer, Herrig swiveled his monitor around so his client could nuderstand, pointing to a number at the bottom. “This is your total balance, sa.”

“Yeah?” Garth shrugged nonchalantly. “So? The exchange rate is amazing.”

Herrig shook his head slowly. “That number, sa, is not in Latelian currency. That is in Trinity currency.”

“Say what now?” Garth looked at the digits carefully. In his haste to get out of the bank and into Central, he hadn’t paid any real attention to the number. He did so now, counting slowly in his head. Garth rose smoothly, put his hands flat on the table, ready to run out of the bank at the slightest sign of trouble. “I didn’t do it. Whatever you think I did, it wasn’t me. I was somewhere else.”

“Sa, sa, please sit down. You’re making Willis nervous.” Herrig put on the best smile he could muster. “Would you like some a refreshment?”

“Water. Water would be good.” Garth couldn’t take his eyes off the balance. It was massive. It was almost too much money for him to wrap his head around. When water arrived via robotic assistant, he accepted the glass and drank it down.

“It comes from a spring near a mountain several hundred kilometers from here. Tasty, no?”

“Sure.” Garth counted the number again. “There’s a hundred thirty-eight billion two hundred thousand eighteen credits and some fiddly bits more in there than there should be.”

Herrig scratched thoughtfully at his earlobe. It was rare, but there were occasions when people of a certain … type took off in their ships and disappeared for a time. Upon returning, they discovered vast fortunes where none belonged. “Ahem. I, ah, took the liberty of accessing the deposits, sa, to understand your situation in greater detail. A large majority of them came from Special Forces. Smaller at first, and then, ah, quite substantial. Memos indicate payment rendered on behalf of research and development? Then, of course, the funds took another leap upwards when you started dabbling in the stock market, then a massive payment out. Sound familiar?”

“Uhuh.” Garth put the glass he’d been fiddling with down on the desk so he wouldn’t drop it. “The R&D payment set-up was an idea Politoyov had to keep the monies from being sent directly to Tynedale/Fujihara.”

“Sa!” Herrig shook a finger warningly. “That is not information I need unless you need for me to represent you. Which,” he indicated a plaque behind him proclaiming him to be a member of the Latelian Charter of Attorneys, “I can do for you.”

“Wait a minute. You said came from Special Forces. Someone else put all that money in my account?” To make a clean break from his old unit and the money-hungry accountants at Tynedale/Fujihara, Garth had sold off his entire stock portfolio as well as waiving any further payments he might be eligible for; the shield generators kept grunts like him alive, and now that he was in the green, there was no point. “Who the fuck would do that, and why?”

Herrig smiled as he located the data. “According to this, sa, Trinity put the money there. More specifically, the Trinity Branch of Terraforming, Planetary Reclamation, and Safety. That’s … well, that’s quite impressive, sa.”

“What do they do?”

“Well,” Herrig shrugged, “a bit of everything, as I understand it. They build new planets, or fix old ones. Among other things, as is often the case with our betters.”

Garth snorted. “Everyone’s the same, all over everywhere.”

“Yes, sa, that is the truth. Now,” Herrig smiled apologetically, “as to when you came in … I must apologize. There’s a certain percentage of Latelians who aren’t all that tolerant of Offworlders –which is odd considering that Port City is home to more than thirty thousand of them, myself included- and I am afraid Si Melissa responded very poorly to your presence. She will be reprimanded by the end of the day. When Si Bekkah accessed your account information, a memo arrived directly from the Trinity government itself. I can assure you, this is no small matter; I’ve been a banker for most of my life, and I have seen only two. Most rare.

For one to come here is rarer still. According to the document, someone from the Trinity government has been trying to contact you at your last address. As is often the case with young men who are inclined to gallivant across space, you left no forwarding address, and why should you? Why would anyone imagine that they would be hearing directly from the Trinity AI? Anyway, along with the first payment was a contractual agreement.”

“Uh, huh?” Thoughts of hamburgers and dead gangsters drained out his left ear, replaced with a big ball of confusion that seemed doomed to grow bigger every time Herrig opened his mouth. The man was clearly excited, and was having a difficult time staying on track.

“The Trinity government purchased your technology for a rather hefty sum, and in accordance with the law, has also seen fit to provide you with a contract outlining royalties and bonuses.”

“Can they do that?”

“Yes, they can. Especially if the design is one that aids in the betterment of mankind. This …” Herrig read the memo again, “This gravnetic shield generator you developed. What, exactly, does it do?”

“Oh, it’s kind of cool, I suppose.” Garth said nonchalantly. “These generators … well, they’re more like distributors, really, they manipulate local gravity, bending it into a kind of shield that can be dense enough to deflect damn near anything. The original design was a complete fluke, and a one-off to boot, but once I knew it was possible, I figured out a way to reproduce the effect. The newer ones’re small enough to be worn as a personal device, and much less dependent on direct AI supervision. Each one’s usually good for about three or four shots, which is all you really need, because after that, battlefield direct engagement’s usually not on the books.”

“I would think, sa, that Trinity went in the opposite direction.” Herrig tapped his temple meaningfully. “Planetary maintenance. Emergency protocols. Think larger.”

Garth’s eyes narrowed into pinpricks as he considered Herrig’s words. “That would work, for sure. Just … just go in the opposite direction, build big-ass distributor columns at key points around the world. Of course, you’d have to figure out a way to make it so it could run without an AI, or minimal AI supervision, and there’s just no way it’d run off normal power sources. Oh yeah, and the fact that the damn thing’d probably slow down the rotation of the planet in the process of protecting it … I bet you could use superdense materials or even some kind of artificial black hole to power everything. Hell,” Garth said with a shrug, “at that size, I’d say that once everything was up and running, the actual power drain would be practically non-existent. Wish I’d thought of it.”

“According to the document you are not reading,” Herrig outlined a few passages of the contract for Garth to skim over, “Trinity believes you did, and is paying you very well for it. For every planet that is outfitted with your shields, you will receive a percentage of that planet’s profits. There are clauses indicating bonuses depending on how well your devices work during, say, a planetary attack, and so on. It’s a very lucrative deal, sa.”

“How does that work?” Garth took a sip of water to conceal his confusion. A businessman born he was not. “I mean, I don’t understand any of this.”

Herrig understood Garth’s uncertainty. The chance of someone simply stumbling into this kind of wealth and this kind of exposure to Trinity was, well, impossible. In most Conglomerate instances, the CEO would probably only hear from the governing AI once or twice in their entire lifetime. “I would say that what you have experienced is one of the last true miracles of this age, sa. If I were to take the time to find the number of businesses that have pulled off something as … as earth shattering as you have, it would be a very small number. No more than ten, and that is being overly optimistic. And even then, you have come off remarkably lucky. Typically, Trinity simply takes what it wants under the auspices of the Human Safety Acts, and that is, as they say, that. If I were to hazard a guess, Trinity has done this because it hopes you will continue on in the same vein.

Whether you intended it or not, your ‘gizmo’ has replaced several different technologies. Now, I am no scientist, but this information claims you’ve increased the level of planetary protection by a factor of twenty while decreasing maintenance costs two and one half times the current rate; not only does your invention provide an invaluable level of protection, it is also phenomenally easier to maintain. It’s safe to assume, at least from Trinity’s standpoint, that a planet protected by one of your shields will always be a productive member of Trinity. Any profits left to a planet after taking care of its own problems goes directly to the AI; you are receiving a percentage of Trinity’s take, and will continue to do so as long as no one else supplants your technologies.”

“How many planets are using the shields?”

“That information is classified, sa, but in the time we have been speaking, your balance has jumped twice and doubled once.” Herrig looked Garth in the eye. “Eventually, you’ll reach a plateau, but I doubt that will come for some time yet.”

“Wow.” Garth was dumbfounded. He went back to that day. “You know, it really was a complete and total accident. There were four Special Forces teams involved in that SNAFU. We’d been hired for a long-term civil action, but our Intelligence was fucked from the get-go; someone somewhere missed the illegal Gamma Plateaus that the insurgents had picked up on the Black Market, and more than two thirds of our operatives were vaporized the moment we hit dirt. A dropship managed to slam a semiBAM into atmos before getting the hell out of there, which screwed the Plateau’s telemetry up pretty good, giving the survivors a few seconds to think.

We hightailed it out of the immediate area, but it wasn’t long before we were caught on radar by ground and air support. They called in our location, and the Plateau’s operators honed in on our hovertank. Melted half the fucking thing into slag, except for one of the AG turbines. Somehow, it’d been turned into a perfect standalone generator, a free-floating two foot wide sphere of antigravity. It’s sitting in a lab at Special Forces HQ right now for all I know. Anyhow, that little violation of physics got me thinking. Same time as this was going on, our BattleSystem was yammering that we had fifteen minutes or less before the Gamma Plateau’s cannons came back on line.

I had to do something because there was just no way we could get out of the blast radius this time; we were lucky that the first blast hadn’t been dead on the money or you and I wouldn’t be talking right now. I ordered the men to tear out the busted AG nodes because it was beginning to look my idea was going to go from my brain to the real world in a lot less time than I’d planned. I told the BattleSystem to start thinking on how to explain how the mistake had happened so I could make a bigger one. It told me to go screw. Not in those terms, you understand, but not polite. It advised me to send some guys out to distract the cannon so the rest of us could run the other way. Theory was we’d eventually get ourselves far enough away from the heat to get a call through to the pick-up squad hanging out by the moon. It was either that or play hopscotch with the fucking thing until a ship with space combat weapons showed up to blow it up.

Obviously, this was not what you’d call a wicked cool idea, so I … I took matters into my own hands. I took a portable plasma cutter and started cutting the living shit out of that AI to get at the innards. I almost died -rumors of an AIs final defense mechanisms aren’t rumors, Sa Herrig, they are painfully true. Or, at least, that’s what the record shows: I don’t have any clear memory of what happened. I don’t really know what I’d done until later, when I reverse-engineered the whole shebang. What I can tell you is that my original design worked perfectly, somehow running off the AI itself, while the revamped one draws its power directly from the planet. Any modifications Trinity made weren’t on the design table at all, but I’ll take the credit.

Same time as this, the cannon operators fired again, only they missed by a mile, thinking we would’ve started hauling ass in the other direction. The next clear memory I have is of telling the men I was going to turn the machine on, and that they had to be inside a relatively small radius. Lost a handful of men who ignored my warnings about the shield radius, but in war, that’s Acceptable Losses. Naturally, the orbital cannon operators detected the power signature and maneuvered to fire down on top of us for maximum effect. I can tell you with utter confidence that being fired on by a cannon designed to raze cities to the ground is alternately the most terrifying and beautiful thing in the world.

Luckily I was wearing my horseshoe underwear and my four leaf clover socks, because the bloody thing worked, and how. The energy beam bounced directly back at the cannon, crippling its AG stabilizers. After fifteen minutes of pyrotechnics, the friggin’ thing crash landed right on top of some goddamned massive military bunker where they were storing nuclear weapons, if you can believe that craziness. After that, there was an Explosion of Massive Proportions. Everyone and everything outside of my makeshift shield was carbonized and more than half the planet was rendered uninhabitable. That was a Very Long Day. Got a medal and everything.”

“Wow.” Sa Herrig whispered, astonished, amazed … astounded. He was sitting across from a bona fide hero, a man who had literally done the impossible. “Take my free legal advice, Sa Garth. Keep the money. You’ve undoubtedly saved the lives of trillions of people. Also this: the next time you invent something, don’t sell it to anyone. Build the factories yourself. Conglomerate. You have the money now, and a trillion credits will be in your account by the end of tomorrow, and that is nothing compared to what you will have. Do you follow?”

“Sure, sure, yeah.” He was rich, really, really rich, and was going to get richer. Garth read the plaque Herrig had indicated at the beginning of their meeting. “Say, you’re really an attorney? You can represent me?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well,” Garth grinned craftily, “since you’re non-Latelian, I can at least run this by you so you can tell me how it sounds …”

Garth looked at the picture displayed on his Sheet, and then again at the wares shop he’d chosen. Like the advertisement for the Hotel Hospitalis, appearances were not only deceiving; they were downright full of crap. It was as if the Latelians had only gotten half the brochure on Tourism for Trade 101: they got the part about having a fancy brochure, but had missed the whole seminar on following through with their claims.

Whatever the case, while the wares shop wasn’t as dingy as Hotel Hospitalis, it was still a far cry from ‘the best place on earth to fulfill your protean needs’. The World of Protean Might was just like any other place, on any other planet, in any other system, and the sooner Latelians got used to the idea that everywhere really was the same as every other where, things would be just dandy.

Hesitantly, Garth pushed his way through the heavy glass doors. He was immediately pleased that the interior was at odds with the outside. Soft music tinkled indiscriminately out of a well-hidden sound system. The shop itself was tastefully laid out with ranks of kiosks displaying the multitude of protean devices available to the public. Wandering unmolested for the moment through the racks, Garth saw that proteus designs ran the gamut from simple machines that were part nanny for young children all the way up to heavy-duty data processors for insane science geeks.

“Hello, sa. I see you are interested in the Protipal.”

“The say what now?” Garth realized he’d been staring so intently at the most complex proteus in the place that a salesman had managed to sneak up on him unannounced.

“The Protipal.” Sa Turuin smiled expansively as he gestured at the silver and chromed proteus that had caught Garth’s eye with enough savoir faire for a dozen salespeople. “The manufacturers wanted to call it the Protean 5000 Megamachine, but that was a little too much for the industry folks to stomach.”

Garth’s lips quirked thinking about the sort of Latelian who’d come up with a name like that; shorter than normal, skinnier than was healthy, and very, very lonely. “What’s it do?”

Turuin pointed to the Sheet mounted next to the demonstration proteus. Even though the Sheet was three times standard size, each virtual page was densely packed with information. “The boys at Protean Designs threw everything they could at this one. It’s the most complex device a layperson can own. For anything, well, better, you’d have work for the government or the military. Regardless, there are some out there who believe that the Protipal is one step closer to AI, and to them, I say ha! Everyone knows that you need diamond optics for that. As I said, it is a very powerful tool.”

Garth wasn’t really sure if that was true or not –his insistent instinct said not- but he was willing to go along with everyone’s opinion until he could prove them all wrong. Garth touched one of the hyperlinks on the Sheet, read the info. “Says here that it can manage all of my personal data. I have a lot of personal data.” He said, thinking of his ridiculously bloated dossier.

“That it can, that it can. As you can see here,” Turuin accessed the specifics concerning storage for Garth, indicating with a finger the section he wanted, “the Protipal can store up to seven and a half thousand hours of real-time footage, complete with high-definition video and audio. And that’s just as the standalone. Working in conjunction with the primary unit, I doubt you would ever come close to reaching the limits of the machine. Some of the boys at the manufacturing labs claim their take on the storage designs mimics the holographic memory core of an AI, but of course, we can’t know for sure.”

“Of course.” Garth murmured, pecking through the different screens of info.

Turuin fluttered a manicured hand. “I’d like to say, sa, that it shows wisdom, good taste, and excellent judgment that you’ve chosen to buy a proteus.”

“Really?” There was no way to get a handle on the Latelian people. They were so hell-bent on some things, and on others, they just flat out didn’t give a damn.

“Absolutely, sa.” Turuin saw a doubtful gleam in his customer’s eye and hastened to set matters straight. “I’m not spinning you a line, sa, to get the sale. Port City is home to around thirty thousand Offworld immigrants, and of those, less than three percent have chosen to purchase a proteus for personal use. For you to buy one –and I hope I don’t upset you- even though you’re not likely to be given citizenship, well, it just speaks to your character.”

“Huh. Uh, what else does this do?” Garth drew Turuin’s attention back to the proteus.

“In addition to being an autonomous functionary for you, it can link to the world network, manage a certain amount of your any business you may need. These devices keep us in touch with our friends and loved ones, allows us to work from home if we can. It really does depend on what you want from it, sa. The possibilities are endless. Oh yes, and this particular model is outfitted with a small Q-Comm transceiver.”

“I suppose that it’d cost extra to use those functions, eh?”

“Sadly, yes. There was some talk of Protean launching their own Q-array, but sales have faltered this quarter. They’ve assured us all that it’ll happen next quarter.”

Garth stroked an imaginary beard, then pushed another link. “Says here that I can program this thing however I want. Izzat so?”

“Sa!” Turuin pulled up his sleeve to show off his own hunter green and metallic blue proteus. “This is mine, and I’ve spent years customizing it. The creators don’t care how you program it, so long as you leave the primary operating system alone; tinkering with that will violate all your warranties and leave you susceptible to hacking. Of course, all proteii come with a basic set of programs, but you can download all manner of software from different networks. Typically, people start coding their own after awhile.”

“Sounds interesting.” Garth touched the screen of the demonstration model thoughtfully. Out in the back of his mind where his hidden memories seemed to hang loose, Garth felt the beginning whispers of an idea that would help Huey with his jail house blues.

“It certainly is.” Turuin straightened his shirt. “I myself uploaded a series of programs the other day, sa, and they’ve been accessed by no less than eighty-three people!”

Garth shook his head, utterly bewildered. “Are these Protean guys the only ones who make these tools?”

“No, no.” Turuin shook his head. “Protean is simply the largest on Hospitalis. Other planets, other companies..”

“A … friend … of mine told me,” Garth savored the memory of Naoko’s luminous green eyes for a second, “she said that when you buy a proteus, you get a larger primary system as well.”

“Your friend told you no lies. A proteus is a magnificent tool as a stand-alone device, but without the power of the home network to rely on, it is limited. Is your friend a si, or a sa?”

Garth wrinkled his forehead.. “Si, my friend, si.”

“Well done!” Turuin glanced over his shoulder at the other salespeople. Both Marin and Ham-Za were gnawing their hands in jealousy; the sale of a Protipal would put him in the lead for sales over the month. “As I was saying, once you purchase a proteus, you do in fact get the primary system at no additional charge. The two units are automatically networked and capable of long-range data traffic via any of the communications systems we use. If you wanted to operate from a non-terrestrial locale, you would of course need to use a Q-Comm, the cost of which is fairly prohibitive. Furthermore, seeing as you are from Outsystem, the proteus network can be modified to operate in the new environment after purchasing the design specifications from Protean Systems. I’ve looked at the specs for it, and while it might be costly to make the modifications, I can assure you that it would be well worth the cost.”

“Um.”

“At no extra cost, the proteus is also fully customizable for the fashion minded.” Turuin grinned. The sale was definitely his.

“Hmmmm.” Garth tabbed through a dozen more pages, even though he was pretty certain he was going to buy one. “Say, uh, Sa Turuin, how complex can the proteus get?”

“Sa?” Turuin asked quizzically. “The Protipal is capable of processing a vast number of different things. It really depends of what sort of software you choose to run. What were you thinking of?”

“Well, see … here’s the thing.” Garth cleared his throat nervously. “I sort of invent things, for the people I used to work for full-time. And … well … look, if I break some kind of Latelian law here in a minute, don’t lose your head. Can the Protipal simulate a three-dimensional programming environment?”

“Eh?” Turuin smiled blankly.

Garth hoped he didn’t press too hard. “Can this proteus program in three dimensions? Could I code in 3D?”

“I would assume so, sa.” Turuin shrugged nonchalantly, then leaned in to share a secret. “Why would you think that difficult? I’ve had people ask me if their proteus can spy on someone else’s, or if they can corrupt data from a remote location. Sadly, the answer is yes, and we see it occurring on the newsfeeds all the time. Such a horrible misuse of a flexible tool. If you wanted to program in three dimensions, I am certain that the Protipal could handle it. Though,” Turuin explained quietly, “you do realize that if you were caught, there’s a very good chance that you would get into some serious legal trouble. After all, you are an Offworlder. Also, it would only be simulated, not the actual deal. In order for 3D-programming to work, an actual AI-capable machine is needed. You could use it to test the code, though, to see if it would crash or work properly. It would definitely be a technical challenge to see if you could get a program like that to run. I’d be interested in seeing the results. If that is something you’re going to want to try, I would also suggest you purchase the holographic emitter upgrade; with it, you can create a workspace of approximately two square feet. I assume that would help?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wonderful. I assume you’ll be buying one today? Shall we sit and get started on the details?”

“Yeah, let’s.” Garth rubbed his hands together. He was going to be able to fix Huey’s deteriorating thought processes after all, and maybe more than that, if the whole proteus thing worked the way he imagined it did.

In the end, he designed his Protipal to be the blackest of blacks trimmed with gently throbbing golden lines at the seams. The screen, when activated, burned with liquid golden fire. It fit snugly on his left arm, from just above the wrist to just below the elbow. He’d learned from Turuin that the proteus was a successful wearable computer because of its flexibility; by tweaking the atomic structure of duronium prior to electroplating, the crafty Latelians had figured out how to keep most of the alloy’s durability but make it comfortable to wear. True to Turuin’s claims, the holo-emitter did generate a nice virtual workspace that was eminently suited to 3D programming.

After careful probing, Garth was able to glean nothing further from the salesman, who either didn’t know enough about the physical aspects of the tools he sold, or just didn’t care. Whatever else could be said about the Latelians, Garth was forced to admire their tenacity when it came to their wonder-metal. He also shelled out a staggering ten thousand dollars by purchasing the schematics for the primary unit.

The wearable unit was done in less than fifteen minutes, but the primary unit was going to take a few days to prepare. In a fit of pique, Garth had asked that the shop send the unit to the Hotel, care of the small robot. He knew that it would only serve to fan the flames of Si Mijomi’s fury, but he didn’t give a crap. The more pissed off Mijomi was, the better.

True to Naoko’s promises, his new proteus was jam packed with vital information. Seconds after activation, the device began pulling data from hundreds of legal sources that were continually broadcasting all over the city. The wealth of information flowing through Hospitalis was amazing. The entire civilization was online in some form or other, and they’d let just about anyone into their lives.

Some jiggery-pokery with the proteus eventually yielded the GPS system, and he was once again astonished at the depth of detail. It shared many features with the one Naoko had uploaded to the Sheet, but the files he now perused were apparently updated by digital satellites far above their heads By playing around with the tool, Garth was able to dial the minimap’s resolution down to such detail that he could actually see the rocks beneath his feet. Attempts to render his presence real-time from the satellites above generated an annoying ‘helper avatar’ hologram that asked for access codes or a simply perverted amount of money to continue. Garth told the avatar to go screw itself.

Hugely pleased with how his day was going, Garth loaded the Sheet-data onto his proteus, then hunted through the files in search of the Contest office building in Central. He noted with a grimace that the registration office was smack dab in the middle of Central City. Another avatar informed him that travel by cab would take forty minutes. Counting his run-in with the gangsters, he’d wasted an hour getting to the bank, and almost another hour inside. Another hour had been eaten up in the proteus shop; as an Offworlder, there’d been a crapload of official documents to fill out before Turuin had been legally allowed to sell him his proteus.

“Oh well.” Garth keyed in a request for a taxi. If he pissed someone off by being gone for more than the four hours he was allotted, he’d deal with it when the time came.

Garth loved cabbies. In all his travels, he’d never met a group of people who knew more about what was going on and who were more inclined to jabber on about what they knew to total strangers. During the forty minute drive to the Contest offices, he learned in short order that there were two main gangs of thugs running Port District, that half a dozen politicians had been fired for illegal activities with known terrorist groups, four Contest promoters died in a fire over the weekend, the Chairwoman was sleeping with the Commander General for the God Soldiers and he, an Offworlder, was going to have his head caved in the moment he set foot outside of the cab because people outside Port didn’t much care for outsiders. The cabbie explained the last matter-of-factly, mentioning that he didn’t care who he gave a ride to so long as he got paid. As they pulled up outside the Contest building, Garth tipped the driver an extra hundred dollars and asked if he’d wait around.

“Sure thing.” The cabbie pulled into a parking spot and turned his ‘busy’ sign on

2006-07-10T18:04:00.000-07:00

MACHINATIONS OF A MACHINE MIND

“Ingrams.”

Historical Adjutant Kant Ingrams looked up from his work the moment he heard his name. A quick check on the security cameras mounted on the wall behind him showed that no one was likely to come by in the next few minutes, giving him leave to have this most important conversation in uninterrupted privacy. Ingrams rose, locked the door to his office, and sat back down. “Here, sir.”

The Trinity AI’s voice was an asexual, crisply spoken voice this time. The last time the ruler of Humanity had spoken with Kant Ingrams, it had been a deep, rumbling basso profundo voice filled with power. “Garth N’Chalez has left Trinityspace.”

Nonplussed, Kant sent a request through his personal AI for all the data he’d accumulated on N’Chalez over the last five years. “He penetrated the Cordon on his own? That’s supposed to be impossible.”

“It remains impossible.” Trinity replied evenly.

“Then …” Ingrams pursed his lips while he tracked an errant thought. “What is he doing in Lately space?”

“He is following his instincts.”

“Ah. I see.” Even though five years had passed, Kant was still a firm believer that the entire corps of men and women dug out of Pluto had willfully misrepresented themselves to the Trinity government. Neither did he hold any form of resentment towards Trinity itself; there was no point in harboring ill will towards an entity so vast and powerful that your life meant nothing at all. Ingrams did feel a small burst of vindication, though. Garth N’Chalez freeing himself from the albatross of a Tynedale/Fujihara debt and taking off for the one place in the entire universe that seemed to offer answers was all the proof he needed to know he’d been right all along.

“In the course of your investigations five years ago, you were alerted by another person in your offices of a ship, a ship similar in nature to the one the Decantees were recovered from, in Lately space. What were your conclusions?”

Kant read the data as it came through. “As I expected, they rigorously denied me access to their system. As a show of good faith, however, they provided me with enough high-resolution holographic footage of the ship and record logs of the discovery to competently analyze the vessel. In the end, I determined that the similarities were nothing more than statistical anomalies.”

“Oh?”

“Yes".” Kant nodded fluidly. “They went so far as to provide me with the metallurgical breakdown of their ‘Box’. I went over the data very carefully. Taking into consideration that the irrationally paranoid Latelians would have taken great steps to alter their reports, the duronium alloy they use is greatly advanced, but is in no way consistent with the alloy or metal of our ship. As for the exterior designs and general shape of their Box, long-term comparisons of thousands of ships of similar nature show a tendency for designers to follow a specific type.” Kant sent the data he’d gathered in the course of his investigation off. “My personal opinion is that the Box was designed in a Latelian laboratory five thousand years ago in an attempt to bolster a failing civilization. From the history of the time, I would say it worked, and very well. My opinion is that Garth N’Chalez is wasting his time there. They will certainly not allow him access to it, leaving them open to the man’s savage talents. For all their obsession on the nature of religion, they worship their national treasure.”

“He will gain access, and with their leave.” Trinity corrected. “Five years ago the Latelians began permitting Trinity citizens to join in their Contest. The grand prize for the winner has always been the opportunity to try and open the Box.”

“What would you like me to do, sir? It’s unlikely in the extreme that anyone will ever accomplish that goal. The indication on these new files,” Kant gestured to his screen, which flowed with summations of Trinity pilots allowed to make stops in Latelyspace, “seems to be that the people there are in trouble again. Letting someone open their Box would be disastrous. If,” Kant added after a moment’s thought, “it’s even built to be opened.”

“It is not about the Box, its design similarities to the ship, or the Latelian’s predisposition towards self-destruction every five thousand years that I want you to go Hospitalis for.” Trinity said patiently. “It is true that the Latelians are in a state of disastrous civil flux at the moment. In an effort to swing their economy away from one primarily militaristic, the Chairwoman has been trying to acclimatize her people to Trinity. Naturally, the most effective tactic to build on this is to allow Trinity soldiers, mercenaries, or criminals to fight in their Contest; if the general population can be made comfortable with their presence there, they can be made to accept more frequent visitors. This has made the Chairwoman very unpopular in certain sectors. So unpopular that their society sits on the brink of a civil war that could quite literally tear their planets apart. Before he was permitted to enter Latelian space, Garth N’Chalez was required to make his service record from Special Forces available to the proper authorities.”

“I see.” Kant nodded, taking over the conversation. “The Chairwoman and her military advisors undoubtedly imagine that N’Chalez is there at your behest to exploit their weakening situation. Because of the Act of Sovereignty you passed, if they can catch him doing something that they can definitively prove is in violation of that Act, they can put a great deal of pressure on your government.”

“Ordinarily, I would not care. The petty machinations of individuals have little concern for me; the ‘pressure’ you allude to would have no affect on my plans for Humanity. I honor their sovereignty for no particular reason other than that group of planets seems to immune to the Dark Ages, a fact which requires more study.” Trinity paused. “Someone in the government has given Garth N’Chalez the freedom to do what he would. Since he believes that this Box is somehow connected to him, that ‘whatever’ will most definitely be catastrophic for Hospitalis. If he is not the victor in the Offworld portion of the Contest, he will undoubtedly seek to gain access any way possible, and it is definite he will react poorly when it is discovered that the Box is a cunning fake.”

“Garth’s actions would not fall under the purview of Historical resurrection, sir. His tendencies towards violence and civil destruction would best be handled by one of your other governmental agencies.” Kant didn’t particularly care arguing with Trinity, but there was little else he could do; since Garth had been cut loose, anything he did fell more towards the Army, or even better, the Enforcers.

“I do not want you to go to Hospitalis in your official capacity as Historical Adjutant, Kant Ingrams.” Trinity said chidingly, as if Kant was the stupidest person in the world. “Garth N’Chalez’ gravnetic shield generators may have set off a chain reaction, resulting in a rapid escalation of the coming Dark Age. I want you to go to Hospitalis as a member of the Dark Age Cabal. I want you to address N’Chalez, and convince him to return to Trinityspace so that he can turn his potent talents to the task of turning aside this next Age. If he remains on Hospitalis during this turbulent period, there is a very high probability that he will die.”

“I … see.” The news that Trinity was aware of his ‘illegal’ activities in the Dark Age Cabal was disheartening, but not altogether unsurprising, given Trinity’s status; the galactic AI had been in place for most of Man’s journey through the stars, and proving itself time and again as the master of all things secret. It was shocking however, to be authorized by the Trinity AI to act on its behalf to persuade someone like N’Chalez to join an organization that was, at its heart, fundamentally against rule-by-AI. “Do you want me to do more than persuade him, if it comes down to it?” Because of his training, Kant was not afraid to step up and deliver as good as he got, it was just that he preferred the bureaucratic method above all others.

“No. Garth N’Chalez is still an unknown quantity. His invention has drastically altered the face of planetary protection, which makes your original assessment of him and the others more correct than I imagined. At the time of his Decanting, he may not have been aware of who and what he was; this may not be true any longer. If we force him to join the Cabal, he may well do so, but with a philosophy very different than the one you and your cabbalistic friends practice; it is not so much that you loathe being ruled by an AI, but that I am secretive, and keep the ‘good stuff’ from you all. Angry and given access to the resources that people like Jordan Bishop can offer, Garth N’Chalez will work at cross-purposes to my reign, bringing about far more destruction and devastation than either you or I would want: psychological profiles run on him during his employment with Special Forces indicates he has no love for me. Or for you. When you meet with him, do so carefully. Familiarize yourself of his activities with the Forces, understand his unique nature fully before you broach his confidence. No matter how prepared you are, he will still be very unhappy to see you.”

“As you command, sir.” Kant waited a few minutes, then began filling out the necessary paperwork for an extended leave for personal reasons. Of course the request would be granted, because it would pass up the food chain of governmental bureaucracy until it reached one of Trinity’s primary representatives, where it would be rubber stamped. Under normal circumstances, a vacation request would take months to be processed because an Historical Adjutant asking for personal time off was like the commander of a nuclear silo leaving the base with the keys to missiles in his pocket, and as such, required serious consideration.

2006-07-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

DISCUSSIONS ON A CAVEMAN

There are three things required to run any civilization effectively; a government, a military, and commerce –industry was just a natural by-product of man’s eagerness to get filthy stinking rich. With its profound control over government and military, Trinity saw no need to restrict the growth of Man as commercial entrepreneurs because it gave its charges something to feel good about. It encouraged the growth and realization of dreams, knowing that at the center of Man’s soul there was a powerful need to consume. Consume land, consume food, consume products. They needed to feel in control of their lives, even if it was fallacy.

Thus, down through the vast span of time, planet-spanning companies known as Conglomerates were born, powerful, influential, grotesquely rich and abnormally lacking in even the most basic of human decency. Government may keep a civilization ticking over, but it was money that made it all worthwhile.

And the greatest granddaddy of them all was BishcopCo.

Because of their instrumental assistance with the alien race who’d introduced Humanity to Quantum Tunnel technology, ancient BishopCo leaders had been able to set themselves on a road of economic and commercial success powerful enough to carve a path of survival through the darkest of Dark Ages. The momentous occasion of eight thousand years ago –arguably one of the most, if not the most, important moments in all of Time- had given them enough power, enough cachet, enough mojo to build a power base impossible to reproduce.

Working with that solid foundation, the rapacious BishopCo principle of ‘power at all costs, screw the little guy’ had heralded a true revolution in the concept of commerce and industry; systemic business. Representatives from the first true Conglomerate had been on the first thousand pilgrim ships heading for the stars in search of new homes. At the time of their departure, those brave men and women could not have known just what their actions would engender hundreds of lifetimes after their own, but they would have been proud to know that they’d done something no other Conglomerate before or since had done; BishopCo was so mighty and so vast that the employees alone could populate whole star systems. Forget standing armies, forget an unthinkable amount of money. If civilization was to reboot tomorrow and bodies were needed, BishopCo would provide.

More money went into Jordan Bishop’s pockets than any other Conglomerate head. The decisions he made dictated the lives and deaths of billions. He was a power unto himself, answerable only to Trinity.

Like all of the older Conglomerates in Trinityspace, headquarters were on Trinity Prime –once known as Earth. Unlike the other systemic corporations, BishopCo’s home base would remain there, in the center of the greatest monument to Humanity, until the skin of the much abused planet finally ruptured and the world began to die in earnest. Until that happened, Jordan Bishop would rule from his roost in Zanzibar, the modern day equivalent to Rome of ancient Earth. All roads led there, and it was from there and there alone that all policy was dictated.

Those Bishops who’d ruled the boundless Conglomerate before Jordan had always grown weary of their chores quickly, sometimes abdicating their thrones after a meager handful of years. Jordan himself was a dynamo of energy and ideas; the current king of commerce had just celebrated his three hundred and fifty-sixth year of steadfast domination on an ever-expanding market, and planned on going for as long as he could, with or without the aid of illegal Black Market rejuves. After thousands of years of selective breeding, Jordan Bishop was genetically predestined to be the perfect businessman; he was fearless in the boardroom, ruthless at the negotiating table and utterly implacable in the eye of the storm. He was not cold or emotionless, because lack of the latter meant no imagination, no drive, and without those bountiful traits, no business could thrive.

In his three hundred plus years, Jordan had weathered more storms than a dozen other men, and he reveled in his power. And why not? His closest competitors were Tynedale/Fujihara, and after them, Voss_Uderhell, but the distance between the triumvirate of Conglomerate power was so great that entire civilizations would have to fall for the gap to be shortened. The only institution to have more power, more wealth, more control, was the Trinity AI itself, but again, it was about measurable tangents. Through BishopCo, Jordan Bishop was King of the Hill, and he liked it that way.

The only way to survive the expansion of Mankind had been to diversify by diversifying as steadily as any organism interested in survival would. It was not merely enough to survive. The mandate was conquer. All Conglomerates designed, constructed, and sold merchandise from flower seeds to generation ships. They all dabbled in genetics and computer programming, in terraforming and strip-mining. After more than eight millennia of expansion, competition was fiercer than ever, leaving some planets pounded into submission by dreadful Conglomerate wars.

But business was business, and even Trinity understood that a little strife and mayhem was good for Humanity every now and then. Taught the upstarts humility and the hungry that there was always more out there.

After all the lies, insinuations, and secrets were thrown by the wayside, it was the the simplest of reasons that explained BishopCo’s ability to stay afloat in a sea of turmoil populated not only by other Conglomerate-pirates eager to see him sink forever beneath the waves, but by horrific storms that plunged the world into Darkness.

Willpower.

Simply put, Jordan had a preternatural ability to do what the next person couldn’t, and in an arena where the competition could easily be described as rapacious and maniacal, that was really saying something. Knowing that there would be an endless stream of people willing to take on employment under any conditions freed Bishop to routinely exterminate people who didn’t meet his exacting standards of business excellence. He demolished his own buildings then built them back up again, twice as high and twice as big. He paid well and delivered substantial rewards, extracting punishment three times as painful as either.

Jordan Bishop lived to make money, and that was that.

With his endless coffers, Bishop bought small starter companies moments before they got to a certain level of brand recognition. He stripped owners of their assets, gave them entry level positions thousands of light-years away from their homes, sold the useless and outdated equipment in offices and laboratories, and then perfected their technologies. Those that wouldn’t sell or, rarely, merge were buried under lawsuits and nightmarish visits from PatenzWare affiliates. Or they just as easily found themselves ground under the mighty Conglomerate heel. Data was torn out of dead AI systems. Legal troubles vanished with a flick of the wrist, Conglomerate responsibility whitewashed with a broad stroke of a revised policy.

Other Conglomerates tried to do the same, but couldn’t muster the same passion.

Yes, Jordan was powerful, and partly because he’d been born into the greatest ‘glom in Trinityspace. Yes, he was the end result of thousands of years of selective breeding. Yes, he was greedy, arrogant, egotistical, narcissistic and at least partially insane. Had to be, with the way things were. Amidst all his shining attributes and limitless power that was his to command, there was one other advantage that Jordan Bishop had over the competition. It was a powerful one, and Jordan would use it until the stars in the heavens were snuffed out and Reality called it a day.

Spur. The android.

An artificially intelligent android, Spur was the only Trinity recognized and approved autonomous AI system in all of Trinityspace. Unlike other AI systems now designed and mass-produced by Trinity itself, Spur had been developed in the secret labs of the Emperor-for-Life Marseilles of two thousand years ago; designed to become self-aware on its own and to exceed its own design specifications, Spur was a marvel of technology that no one else could exceed. The fear of reprisals from the Trinity government were too great to even consider designing something like Spur on paper, let alone actually constructing one. Surpassing all Turing tests and outstripping traditional modes to determine intelligence, Spur was a unique creature of the highest order. He was a vast artificially intelligent mind housed in a perfect android body, and his existence was deemed miraculous as well as deadly; miraculous because of what he was, deadly because even though the deadly ADAM Wars had happened thousands of years ago, the terror of machine minds in utter control of their surroundings would never fade. Much had been lost to the Dark Ages, but the history concerning the depredations of rampaging AI machines was untouched in its entirety.

Spur was a creation of the EuroJapanese Emperor-for-Life and was the man’s prized possession, but it was one the ruler would never see again. Following its construction, Spur had been sent to treat with Adrian Bishop over a gentlemanly difference. Unaware of the android’s existence until it was too late to prevent its activation, Trinity hastily took control of the situation by defining the quality of Spur’s existence from that moment forward; no matter the circumstances, be it marauding super aliens from another dimension or a Dark Age so profound that the end would never come, it, Spur, could never leave the confines of Bishop’s main holdings.

With powerful, armor clad entities such as the Enforcers and the rampaging, self-aware, non-corporeal Turing Regulators at its beck and call, Trinity’s proclamation was met with full cooperation: Spur might be a machine, but he was alive, and appreciated his life for what it was. Unable to leave, the android learned quickly that to communicate with an AI outside of the Bishop sphere of influence as an AI was to invite severe reprimands. Spur learned to speak with his lesser brothers and sisters as a Man would, and learned in the process how to grow ever quicker towards a state of perfection.

Cast adrift from the guiding light that was its master, Spur did the only thing it could. It went to work for the Bishops, and after thousands of years, it had become a permanent, necessary fixture. A mind like Spur’s was capable of performing quintillions of tasks in real-time, and it was with great willingness that Jordan used the android’s prowess to his advantage; others in the Bishop dynasty had done the same, but, again, they had lacked the imagination to do things properly.

“My Lord.”

Jordan Bishop took a bite of sausage from his plate, chewing thoughtfully, ignoring the immaculately dressed alabaster android. “This meat comes from one of many Offworld planets within Trinityspace, a world called Skr. The natives of this world hunt the animal for days on end, and because of its size, are forced to cure the meats right there; the natives themselves, though tenacious as ticks, could never hope to carry the carcass home in time to process the flesh properly. It is then packaged for sale and shipped Offworld by an incredibly minor Conglomerate, where roughly ninety-nine percent of the people who consume this meat have no concept of the trials involved in bringing it to their plates. It is assumed that if one consumes this meat, that they are truly elite, and in some circles, it is actually considered the height of wealth and panache to pretend the meat is actually edible. There is, of course, a simpler method to get the meat, yet the Skrrans prefer to do the way they have done for however long they’ve been doing it.”

Spur bowed deeply, forelock sweeping the ground. “My Lord.”

Jordan wiped his mouth carefully with a silk napkin. “The meat is absolutely foul, though. The animal, indeed everything on Skr, is inimical to humans. Regardless, they have the decency to hold fast and true to tradition. You bring news?”

“I do, my Lord.” Spur, who had long since grown accustomed to Jordan’s particular brand of humor, was confident that Jordan was already well aware of the situation and merely wanted to have it explained to him so he could get angry.

“Very well.” Jordan examined the screens in front of him critically. After hundreds of years of watching his business grow, mutate, evolve, he’d become a master at sensing the rhythm of his various concerns, and of intuiting the shape of things to come. It was as easy as checking his pulse, and took no more effort. This morning, though, the shape had changed, a sour note falling into the rhythm. More to the point, his liquid cash reserves, which had been growing steadily for the past few hundred years, had suddenly stopped showing a profit. “What have you learned?”

“There has been,” Spur intoned, “a change in technologies.”

Jordan quirked his eyebrows. “An Offworld patent?”

When Trinity had arrived on the scene, neatly saving Humanity from a disaster from which they could not have survived, it had made several things abundantly clear; one, its desire was to see Humanity spread to the furthest corners of the Universe in which they lived. Two, it would do as little as it could to see Humanity exploited or tainted by the presence of aliens. Trinity was not xenophobic, merely cautious; working from the impossible-to-understand strata of near-galactic proportions, the AI was well aware of just how many ‘Offworld’ beings viewed the Human race, and wanted to minimize the threat of galactic war. Using a combination of threat, control, and sciences illegal for anyone else to even imagine let alone implement, Trinity had eventually managed to force every single alien race within its own rapidly growing borders to stay within the confines of their own systems. Naturally, dozens of Conglomerates did illegal business with these Offworlders, and were permitted to do so as long as the technologies making it into Trinityspace did not fall within the carefully ordered list of proscribed sciences. It was not unheard of for an Offworld technology to make a significant impact in Trinityspace. A case in point was the Q-Tunnel technology itself.

“This is not the case, my Lord.” Spur drew a slender finger across Jordan’s desk, loading the accumulated data into the resident computer.

Jordan read the précis quickly. “This is … disconcerting to say the least, Spur. I don’t like the idea of another Conglomerate stealing from me, nor do I wish to wade through the rest of this … this … waste of time. If I wanted to read, I would not have asked for your presence.”

Spur bowed. As he had initially surmised, Jordan was angrier than he’d been in at least fifty years, and was feeling … petulant. “The technology is first generation. It was invented in the field by one Captain Garth N’Chalez, a mercenary captain in the employ of Special Forces. Initial design specifications were engineered from the larger model and were then patented by the Captain for personnel usage. A notation in the file I was able to procure indicates that Captain N’Chalez forced Supreme Commander Aleksander Politoyov to purchase the hardware and lease the software.”

“Innovative. Continue.” Supreme effort kept Jordan’s wintry-green eyes from blazing with anger.

“In addition to the payment schedule, Captain N’Chalez received consultation fees for other research and development. The sums involved were minimal, and owing to the nature of the Captain’s relationship with Special Forces, it is evident that the Captain had an ulterior motive for the pricing scheme he forced Politoyov into.”

“Which was?”

Spur clasped his hand together behind his back, sealing his fingers together inside the voluminous sleeves of his red and gold silk brocade robes. “The other information I managed to acquire came at great price, my Lord, and is of a sensitive nature. Possessing it could get us into trouble.”

“Get on with it, android.”

Spur nodded. “Slightly over five years ago, a Tynedale/Fujihara mining operation discovered an ancient relic deep within Pluto’s crust. Operating under the aegis of Trinity’s Historical Services, they contacted a Historical Adjutant to oversee the operation the moment the storage container was discovered. Along with fourteen other people, Captain N’Chalez was removed from deep cryogenic suspension five years ago at a remote Tynedale/Fujihara facility. In accordance with Historical Services’ mandate, the Adjutant attempted to gather information about the time period from which these people came. As you know, all costs for the operation would have been absorbed by Historical Services if even the smallest of insights into the past had been given. This was not the case; all fifteen of them were suffering from a devastating case of amnesia that left them with no information beyond their names. The Adjutant on the scene, someone named Kant Ingrams, was forced to send the costs back to Tynedale/Fujihara. Twelve of the fifteen Decantees were killed during an escape attempt that raised the price for their ‘resurrection’ by several million credits. The Trinity AI resolved the issue by finding the remaining three Decantees financially responsible for the costs of waking them up and the repairs made to the facility. Owing to their apparent military background, amnesia or not, the three Decantees, two male and one female, were indentured into the three primary military organizations. Garth N’Chalez used his invention of the so-called gravnetic shield generators to cut short his stay in Special Forces by upwards of twenty years.”

“How long were they suspended for?” Jordan asked, intensely curious. Through various avenues, he was familiar with Kant Ingrams; the wiry, obsessive man was Trinity’s heavy-hitter when it came to Historical Services. Ingrams was overly zealous in his drive to understand and prevent future Dark Ages, oftentimes operating on the outer extreme of Trinity’s tolerance. His forte was destroying evidence of dangerous technologies and burying the truth before it got out into the open. The thin, high strung little man had a death toll numbering in the thousands. He had a Trinity Enforcer at his beck and call. For him to be drawn into a simple Decantation was … disconcerting.

“The report, though shocking, maintains that the entire group had been in stasis for approximately ten thousand years, placing them before the first Exodus War, the first Dark Age and the ADAM Wars.”

Jordan stroked his goatee. That certainly explained Kant Ingrams’ involvement in the matter; much was lost to each of the galactic Dark Ages that Trinity’s domain suffered, and with these … cavemen … from the dawn of time in his hands, Kant must have surely thought answers would abound. All of the Historical Services minions believed that the key to prevent the threat of another Dark Age was to plumb the depths of time and space. Trinity approved the research as a matter of course, but never actively encouraged them in their additional goals; much of what remained from each of the Dark Ages was distinctly dangerous, and from the reports Jordan had seen, really and truly did need burying. Jordan could see how eager Kant would have been, and how terribly dismayed that none of them had illuminated even a single point for the man. “How very frustrating.”

“My Lord?”

“Lost in thought, Spur. You say these people came from so far ago? How is it possible that they survived stasis for so long? Surely the technology of ten thousand years ago is pale by comparison.” Jordan consulted his reference software. “The oldest recorded Decantee is someone named Stephen Shambell, Decanted just after the last Dark Age. He’d been frozen for four hundred years, his recovery a long one. I concede that these new people were Decanted and managed to survive, but I still fail to see how they survived for that long. And you say they almost escaped, destroying much of Tynedale/Fujihara’s outpost at the same time.”

Spur paused, digesting the information at his command. “The time period in question is rumored to have been a Golden Age, if you will, of scientific discovery. According to Trinity’s own databanks, technological developments were happening so fast at that time that civilization had very little opportunity to explore any one of them fully before it was supplanted by another. Since the first Dark Age appears to have occurred some two hundred years after these people were interred, it is unsurprising that they knew nothing of the mechanisms spawning that cessation. Trinity further offers the theory that in many ways, the people of that time could have been far more advanced in certain areas than we are today; they did not suffer from the restrictions that we do today. Attempts at reverse-engineering the vessel used to store these people have, thus far, met with repeated failure. Current time to complete the analysis of both the alloys of the craft and the field generators that apparently assisted in their cryogenic sleep is another eighty years.”

There were far too many ‘could haves’ in conjunction with this Garth N’Chalez, making Jordan very uncomfortable. “That is not so long, in AI-measured time.” Jordan stared at the picture of the man Spur claimed was responsible for the loss in revenue. A caveman, a throwback from a time so far ago that it was impossible to appreciate. He even looked less civilized, with his ragged black hair, blue eyes and battle-hardened face. Regardless of his personal feelings, Jordan had to admit that Trinity’s hypothesis on Man’s level of technology back then was plausible. Unlikely, but plausible.

Regardless of the imperfect information concerning the era from which these Decantees had supposedly come from, there was the undeniable fact that right then, at that very moment, there were more than a thousand devices of varying complexity in use that could not be duplicated, reverse-engineered, and in some cases, even understood. Trinity’s attention to these particular Decantees was well understood, even appreciated, especially with the imminent threat of another Dark Age looming uncomfortably close on the horizon.

“That is in AI processing time, my Lord. The metallic frame has thus far resisted every test known to Man, and the fields protecting the inner workings prolong the examination. Trinity scientists have coined the term ‘suspension field’ to describe the phenomena. Their current hypothesis is that, once activated, the field renders anything within it outside time. In an effort to explain how the high-resolution deep crust scanners employed by Tynedale/Fujihara missed the ship, the technicians working on the case have posited that a second field cloaked the vessel in some way. The drill, a kilometer wide at its smallest, collided with the craft and either damaged the mechanism powering the field or disengaged it.”

“It is my understanding, Spur,” Jordan said slowly, trying desperately to digest the impossible, “that these Decantees, from this mythical time before time, were unable to offer Ingrams anything in the way of importance.”

“That is so, my Lord.”

“Then what, by all the Gods, has this caveman created, and how?”

“My Lord, the device is known as a gravnetic shield generator. A unique combination of antigravity/gravity waves are manipulated by a series of complex emitters and handled by a further series of machines. The machine itself is powered by direct absorption of electromagnetic waves. N’Chalez designed the units for use in combat, but Trinity purchased the patent and re-engineered the design to be powered by manmade black holes, increasing the capacity a thousandfold. Quite succinctly, it supplants all other forms of planetary defense and environmental shielding for inhospitable planets. I have provided you with a detailed assessment for later perusal. Captain N’Chalez’ design is flawless from every angle, sire, yielding one hundred percent efficacy against hostile forces. In light of maintaining safety, Trinity has opted to refrain from testing Hand of Glory missiles, but virtual tests show high levels of resistance from the planet-busters, possibly even total. Trinity has not tested against Offworld technology at this time, but the current level of threat from non-Humans is rated green at the moment. Once activated, power required to maintain each facility is categorized as less than minimal. Operating on a planetary scale, this device is more cost efficient than the energy it takes to run the software. I feel it incumbent upon myself to mention that the disparate technologies used to create this device have been existent for thousands of years. It seems that while Captain N’Chalez was unable to provide any insights into Human history, he is able to work within the present. As per existing defense contracts with all Conglomerates, Captain N’Chalez receives a percentage of each planet’s gross income.”

“And since,” Jordan grated, “it is cheaper and better to use these ‘gravnetic generators’, the dollar value assigned from each planet has tripled.”

“This is true, my Lord.”

“Has this caveman invented anything else likely to shake the Firmament of Heaven?”

“No, my Lord. He has since quit Special Forces and is currently wandering throughout Trinityspace. I am unable to locate him, and during my initial efforts, I was warned away by a representative.”

“With good reason, Spur, with good reason. He is not a Conglomerate, which makes him vulnerable to … mishap. Find him. Then employ someone to kill him. This caveman had his chance to live in peace, but he waived that right the moment he took money from me. When he is dead, we will start a smear campaign. Something flashy, something about the dangers of manmade blackholes. All under the guise of sincerity, of course.”

“As you wish.”

2006-07-10T18:02:00.001-07:00

DAY THREE:

GOD SOLDIERS, ATTACK!

Garth wondered how in the hell any one of the Contestants hoped to win the Contest if they spent most of their nights drinking their damned fool heads off and getting into unsanctioned fights with each other. As a man who needed very little sleep, he was accustomed to having the wee hours of the morning to himself, time that he spent in deep contemplation of the navel or whatever happened to be on television. Unfortunately for him, all of the stuff on the television at three AM on Hospitalis was a total regurgitation of the stuff they aired during the day, and he already knew what his navel looked like, which had left him with ample time to learn everything he could about the gun he’d stolen from the corpse. And, of course, listening to the screams and howls and battle cries of five hundred or so drunken loons cavorting through the Hotel trying to kill their enemies.

Thankfully the protean system within the Hotel was one of the only things working properly; the air conditioning problem in the main lobby had been replaced with a heating conduit problem, and if you stood still for more than a minute, you started cooking.

In short order, Garth learned the handgun –oversized even for his larger-than-average hand span- was classified as an Obenstrech .60 caliber automatic machine pistol. The ‘Stretch-gun’, as it was more commonly known, was a favorite for street thugs because they were easy to come by. For over four hundred years, they’d been the official sidearm for God army infantrymen. Less than fifteen years ago the handgun had been decommissioned in favor of high density energy weapons. Enterprising soldiers in charge of destroying the weapons had made themselves a fast buck by selling off entire caravans of the weapon to the highest bidder before getting caught in an internal investigation. There was a glut of Stretch guns throughout Latelyspace.

Footage of what Latelians did to traitors was interesting, in a Marquis de Sade kind of way.

His Stretch gun had been remodeled to make it work with a silencer –itself a remarkable piece of high-tech sound-baffling in that it was a mere two and a half inches long-, which made its previous owner something more than an average thug out to riddle some poor schmoe full of holes: only top notch thugs and gangsters had the dollars to spring for silencers.

Just why someone with that kind of juice wanted him dead after less than 24 hours on the planet was a mystery that needed solving, but research into the logo engraved onto the credit chips hadn’t yielded any usable results, other than that it belonged to ‘a gang’. If he wanted to get any further than that, Garth suspected he was going to need Huey’s help to distil thousands of hours of data into just a few lines; the Latelian network and file-storage protocols were bizarre even by his phenomenally lazy standards.

Other than the particulars of the Stretch –who made it, why, the methods of making it, interesting side notes- it developed that any citizen caught with one of the guns, even in a collector’s box, was guaranteed a one-way ticket to some place called ‘The Peak’. Garth guessed it wasn’t a fine dining establishment.

Lucky for him, though, anyone could own the bullets for the gun. At first he was worried that someone calling up a gun store and asking for a few dozen cases of .60 cal shells would attract attention, but in the course of looking for a local distributor Garth discovered that there were a number of groups and clubs who went out of their way to get hold of new and exciting rounds. He could order up the boxes as easy as one two three and if anyone questioned him, he’d say he was a collector. Garth entered a request with a place called ‘Sa John’s Bullet Emporium’ for a few boxes and headed down for a quick breakfast getting his day started.

As soon as he got into the banquet hall, Garth was immediately accosted by one of the handlers. Since the debacle the day before, the Contest promoters had decided it was in their best interests to assign one handler per person.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!”

Garth, mouth full of cheese Danish, turned to look at the man shouting to get his attention. He was down earlier than most of the other Contestants, so the banquet hall was mercifully quiet. A few of the other guys he’d made eye contact with the day before were eating and talking quietly amongst themselves. Serious competitors, unlike the gomers sleeping off their alcohol-induced comas. “Yeah?”

“You Garth N’Chalez?”

Swallowing noisily, Garth reached out and grabbed hold of the man’s proteus bearing forearm. He twisted until he could see the little screen. He nodded at the image. “Sure looks like me.” He let the handler go. One of the men at a far table had seen the move and was nudging his buddies to pay attention.

Undaunted, Sa Robret Chavez bulled his chin forward. He wasn’t afraid of any Offworlder, no matter how dirty and savage. “There is some information missing from your registration files, and I need to ask you some questions.”

Piling his plate full of sausage, egg, bacon, and something that looked a lot like cornbread, Garth nodded to an empty seat. Balancing the full plate with one hand, he poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down. His handler sat down opposite him. “Who’re you?” he asked, attacking his plate with gusto.

“Robret Chavez. I work for the Contest.” Robret kept his hands folded on the table; getting one of his fingers near the blur of eating utensils, teeth and food was likely to result in a trip to the hospital. He’d never seen someone eat that way in his entire life, and he had a brother in the God army.

“Don’t look Latelian to me.” Garth muttered around some cornbread.

“I … that’s none of your business.” Robret replied hotly.

“So what,” Garth asked after taking a good, long, thoughtful sip of coffee, “makes you think anything about me is your business?”

“If you expect to fight in the Contest, your records need to be complete.” Robret looked over his shoulder at the other men in the room. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought they were paying him and Garth more attention than was warranted. As a matter of fact, it looked like they were making bets.

“Wait here.” Garth got up and loaded himself another plate, this time grabbing a double-handful of bacon. Fuck the other Contestants. He sat back down and repressed a smile as he saw how unhappy Robret Chavez was getting. “Why don’t you tell me what’s missing and I’ll decide if I want to fill in the blanks.”

Frowning fussily but seeing there was going to be no easy resolution, Robret conceded defeat. “Each of the Contestants, even you Offworlders, needs to have a press packet drawn up for reporters and journalists. This is to prevent you from answering the same questions over and over again. This information is also used to generate collectible memorabilia for Contest enthusiasts.”

“I get any money from the sale of those items?” Garth flashed a wink at the assembled Contestants. One or two were actually taking notes now, on how to deal with their own handlers, who were looking on in astonishment.

“Um, no.” Robret couldn’t believe the audacity of the man. It was an honor to fight in the Contest. The fact that the horrible Offworlders had even been given a chance to open the Box if they were the last man standing was incredible. Money shouldn’t even be an issue.

“Then why should I care if the information I gave you is incomplete?” Garth belched loudly. He gave Robret a sloppy grin. “Nothing burps better’n bacon.”

“Sa,” Robret felt his cheeks turn red, “if your life is in danger in the ring, your popularity with the viewers could very well save it. The more in-depth your press kit is, the more detailed your collectibles, the more likely it is people will vote to let you live.”

“Oh.” Garth said, pretending that he’d never even considered that as a possibility. “Well. What are you missing?”

“Everything from before five and a half years ago seems to be missing.” Robret said, heaving a sigh of relief. “And large portions of those five years seem to be blacked out.”

“Sucks to be you, pal.” Garth shrugged. He slopped some eggs onto a piece of cornbread and shoved the resulting pile into his mouth. “Wasn’t around five years ago. Other stuff’s classified.”

Robret sat there, watching the Offworlder stuff his face with food, a look of utter incomprehension on his own. It simply wasn’t in him to understand a man who had no interest at all in putting his best foot forward. Every other Contestant in the Hotel, and those currently being shipped in, had willingly told everything they could about themselves, sometimes lying so badly about past exploits that they’d actually started laughing. It didn’t matter, just as long as the promoters were given something to tell the gameheads. “But …”

“Look,” Garth smiled easily, “if it makes it any easier for you, just make some shit up. I talked with some guy named Sa Miguel Hertzog at the registration office about all this, and he said it’s really not necessary for my press kit or whatever to be truthful.” Actually, it’d taken a modest bribe to convince Miguel of this, but that was beside the point. After killing four members of a local gang, he didn’t want anyone knowing his service record. Someone in office would probably take it the wrong way.

“I can’t do that.” Robret said indignantly, stiffening up. “It would be wrong.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Garth snapped, his patience worn thin. “I was raised by rabid wolf-men on 166-Kierny-12 in the Portsmouth System. Living on nothing but roots, tubers, and the occasional stupid backpacker who got lost in the woods, I eventually learned how to speak by listening to a malfunctioning hooker-bot. I killed a park ranger, got thrown in jail. While there I learned how to knit. I like boats, and fluffy kitties.”

Robret nodded, giving in. After thinking about it, the Contest handler realized it really didn’t matter what was said about the Offworld Contestants, so long as no one said anything different. He gathered from Garth’s attitude that anything would go over just fine with him. His primary concern was being left alone. Knowledge that he was going to have to talk more with Garth made Robret sincerely regret his decision to move from Marketing into Handling. He was a much better designer. “I have your itinerary for the day.”

Garth pushed his plate away with a clatter of cutlery. “Again, sucks to be you. I read over the requirements on the way back from registering yesterday, and it doesn’t say anywhere in there that I’ve got to follow the whole thing. I get four hours a day alone time. I’ve got shit to do this morning. I’ll be at this weigh-in thingie that’s going on later in the day, and then it’s me, on the couch, eating and drinking and occasionally farting. And if you don’t like it, you can try and stop me.”

Robret, who’d heard about Garth’s little display of physical prowess from one of the other handlers, was in no mood to risk his life over something that was intended to do nothing more than keep the Offworlders out of trouble. If Garth N’Chalez wanted to roam the streets inciting good, honest, hard-working Latelians into a riot, then so be it. If everything worked out well, Garth would get killed by a rampaging mob and he could go back to Marketing.

Si Mijomi leaped out at Garth as strolled casually out of the banquet room. He was smug with satisfaction. “What do you want, Si Mijomi?”

The terribly thin woman glared daggers at him, and actually drew her lips back in a snarl when she caught sight of his proteus. She remembered the words of warning from Management, though, and bit back her scathing words. “You are not allowed to have things delivered here.” She hissed.

“Why not?” Garth asked, continuing on towards the front doors. He couldn’t believe how hot it was in the lobby. The few plants lining the Front Desk had wilted away into nothingness, and the carpet was actually starting to grow. He expected if the problem wasn’t fixed by the time he got back, most of the Contestants would be cooked alive. At least then Mijomi could have something to eat.

“You just aren’t.” Anticipating dissent, Mijomi had prepared a Sheet containing Management’s reasons why not. She thrust it into his hands. “You are lucky Hakimi’s called to double-check the address, Offworlder. I would have just thrown the network into the street.”

“Something tells me you wouldn’t be terribly broken up about that.” Garth loaded the Sheet’s info onto his proteus and tossed the useless wafer back to Mijomi. “Forewarned is forearmed, Si Mijomi. I’ll take care of the matter.”

“See that you do, Offworlder.” Mijomi’s face split into a caricature of a smile, and she stormed back to her perch at the Front Desk.

“Egads.” Garth shuddered. Mijomi was a horrible woman.

Outside, while he waited for the cab driver from the day before to pick him up as they’d agreed, Garth contacted Hakimi’s and asked them if they’d hold onto the main system for him until he could find someplace to store the thing. His idea to get the main system past Port security was still in the planning stages, and he needed some place safe to examine the innards without drawing suspicion. When Sa Turuin said that it would be no problem, Garth promised the flighty salesman one more time that he’d call back the moment he figured out how to program a proteus in 3D.

Then he called Bullet Emporium and asked them to put the order on hold until he got back in touch with them later on that day. Sa John didn’t look too pleased at having to do that, but once Garth promised to buy a couple cartridges of something called ‘.60 cal splitshot’, he relented.

Five minutes later, Jimmish Dorn rolled up in his taxicab and Garth hopped in. “Heya, Jimmy.”

Jimmy looked at his fare through the rearview mirror. For an Offworlder, Jimmy supposed the guy was all right. He was a good tipper and didn’t act like he was better than anyone else. More importantly, he’d given him a good solid tip on who to bet on during the Contest. “Not too bad, Sa Garth.”

“You know where we’re headed?” Garth booted up a sketch program and started doodling out the gang logo he’d memorized.

“Oh yeah, sure.” Jimmy merged onto the freeway that would take them directly to the space port. Every time he came out this way, the cabbie was amazed at how much traffic there was. It was like an epidemic. “’s one of my regular runs.”

“Get into any trouble with your boss over me?” Garth wanted to avoid getting Jimmy into problems. The cabbie was friendly, and willing to put up with all the stupid questions an evil Offworlder had, which was a rare commodity as far as Garth could tell; working under the assumption that the government was spying on him, Garth wanted to avoid getting Jimmy into trouble.

“Sa Stephan don’t care who I pick up so long as I log the fare.” Jimmy cut a delivery truck off before the fool could cut him off. “It’s not unheard of for cabbies to drive one person around all day, especially, you know, around Central.”

“Just so long as everything’s cool.” Garth finished up the logo sketch. “Hey, Jimmy … your prote set up to receive data?”

“Hold on a sec.” Jimmy propped his knees up against the steering wheel, tapped a few commands into his well-worn proteus, then took control with his hands again. “Go ahead. What you sending me?”

“A logo I saw yesterday.” Garth sent the small picture off and settled back into the seat. For some reason, he found the rush and roar of traffic very relaxing, and he started to daydream about what was in the ship.

“Oh yeah,” Jimmy said with a laugh, jerking Garth out of his reverie, “I know those guys. Gang name of The Port Side Boys. Big-time, from what I hear. One of the other cabbies who drives this area told me they tried to shake him down a couple months ago.”

“Any idea what they’re into?”

“They bothering you or something?” Jimmy tried to gauge Garth’s reaction, and failed miserably.

“No. Saw their logo, got curious. Wanna make sure if I do run into ‘em, I know what to expect.”

Jimmy nodded. It made a lot of sense, seeing as how Garth was an Offworlder fighting in the Contest. If anyone was going to attract the attention of those guys, it’d be someone who wasn’t really all that welcome in the first place. And a rich guy like Garth was an even better target. Jimmy didn’t know how rich Garth was, but he was getting a thousand dollars an hour to drive the guy around, so he figured rich enough to get the Portsiders’ attention.

Garth waited patiently while the Security Officer, this time a man twice as big as any Latelian he’d seen so far, went through the motions of frisking him and checking him for illegal substances and evil intentions. It was all an act, because Garth had already done his due diligence by contacting Port Authority to warn them he was coming; the avatars running the interface had informed him that as a precautionary measure, Meadowlark Lemon was now under camera surveillance, at no extra cost. The supposedly non-sentient Port avatars had also been very succinct, in their warnings about any perceived criminal activities; if they didn’t like what they saw, the spaceship would be immediately fried and he would be thrown into the deepest, darkest cell on the planet. Being manhandled by a guy with hands big enough to wrap his fingers around a basketball was very uncomfortable. Garth was very happy to be let go, and suggested that the next time the guard wanted a good time, dinner and dancing should be involved.

Meadowlark Lemon was still all by its lonesome on the far end of the landing docks, surrounded by an additional ring of anti-AI devices and a dozen glaringly obvious cameras. The presence of an AI on the planet was making someone very nervous. So nervous, in fact, that it was actually kind of funny. Whoever the mystery worrier was, they would never know they were wasting resources and sleepless nights; because Huey was now officially a rogue AI, he would do whatever it took keep his inorganic ass alive and functioning, even if it meant putting up with stupid rules and regulations.

Garth waited for the security systems clamped on the doors to cycle open, then climbed in.

“Where in the hell have you been?” Huey demanded the moment Garth was in and the doors were closed.

“I had some things to do, little buddy.” Garth couldn’t believe he’d spent almost a month in the little ship. He certainly didn’t miss the patina of stink that being cooped up in tight spaces gave birth to; even if it was his own odor, it wasn’t pleasant. He was beginning to understand why the previous owner had spent so much time having sex with anything that moved.

“Do you know what they’re doing?” Huey demanded. “Five minutes after you left, they wheeled in these gigantic screens and started showing me all kinds of television shows on how great life is without artificial intelligence. When they got bored of that, they started trying to trick me into sticking my head out. They opened up data channels all over the place. They pretended to be you, calling for help. Day and night, boss, day and night.”

“You seem okay.” Garth offered, walking through the ship, looking at the deck plates and bulkheads. He opened one of the access panels for the ridiculously small ‘engineering’ section of the ship and began poking through various readouts, his vague plan to help Huey slowly taking shape.

“Yeah, only because I’m about a million times smarter than these guys.” Huey retorted scathingly. “Never seen such bad acting in my entire life.”

“Tell me about it.” Garth took some snapshots with his proteus of the various readings for later examination then made his way aft, towards the engines. For a ship that had cost him more than four hundred thousand credits, Garth sill had major reservations about being inside for any length of time; the design of the Meadowlark Lemon was not one he had any good feelings about. The furthest point from the operations center of the ship was the bedroom where the previous owner had engaged in any number of carnal violations on helpless men, women and animals. On the other side of those walls –triply thick and guaranteed to keep radiation and other deadly emissions away- were the engines, formally identified as Roussard-Myiol fusion reaction drives. Informally, they were one of the most dangerous and explosion-prone drives in existence. The slightest imbalance in the fuel cell matrixes or in the combination chambers and the whole damned thing would go up like the Fourth of July. The fact that the engines needed constant monitoring was presumably why the last owner had decided to buy Hubert the Passionately Lame AI; Lord knew Garth didn’t have the patience to adjust the flow every twenty minutes, so there was no way in hell a sybaritic hump-freak could.

Separating engines from sleeping quarters was six feet of solid metal specifically designed to absorb, redirect and otherwise diminish the risk of lethal doses of radiation. For reasons never explained by Gary the salesman, the ship didn’t possess the software or the scanners required to prove or disprove whether or not the engines, which were about seventy years old and in dire need of maintenance, leaked radioactive materials. Convinced of his own immortality after the seven different types of hell he’d gone through working for Special Forces, Garth had nevertheless been uncomfortable testing his theoretical indestructibility out with the engines; the few times he had slept, he’d dozed fitfully in the pilot’s chair, feet propped up on the consoles.

“What’re you looking for?” Huey asked warily. The thoughtful, vaguely deceitful look in Garth’s eye was one that the AI would never forget. The last time his owner had gotten that shifty expression on his face, he’d been viciously assaulted and reprogrammed. It was therefore logical and eminently practical to assume the shifty-eyed, devious countenance would always mean trouble.

“Hm?” Garth planted an ear against one of the thick bulkheads and rapped his knuckles loudly. “Working on an idea to give you some freedom.”

“Like?”

Garth made a notation on his proteus. “Too soon to tell yet.” He walked back to the flight cabin and sat down. All of the monitors showed different sections of his personnel records and mission debriefs. “What’s going on in here?”

“Since,” Huey began tightly, “I am going to be locked up in here for months, I decided I’d take the time to learn more about the maniac who owns me. To, you know, get a feel for the kind of danger and lunacy I’m likely to be involved with. Which, after going through your mission files, seems to involve a hell of a lot of explosions and getting shot at.”

“And what have you discovered?” Garth activated one of the keyboards and started looking for the blueprints to Meadowlark Lemon. They came up immediately, and to his immense satisfaction, he learned right off the bat that most of the interior stress-bearing struts that shored up the vessel were independent of one another. If the ship were to experience, say, a collision with another vessel or a meteorite of a specific size, the bulwarks under the deck plates and closest to the point of impact would absorb the majority of the kinetic transference before any others were affected. The central portion of the ship, that path directly from the sleeping quarters to the ‘flight deck’ would also be very well protected during such an occurrence; the foamed metal superstructure of Meadowlark Lemon was thick enough to prevent any collisions of a ‘natural’ origin from breaching the hull. As the comm jockey from Smash All Infidels had so rightly pointed out, the armor simply wasn’t rated to protect the occupants from missiles, lasers, or other types of offensive weaponry.

The super good news was that the hull of the ship was durable inside as well as outside; any explosion or similar detonation inside the walls could be contained, if things were done … properly. The appearance of the damage sustained would seem to be more catastrophic than it really was, and if someone were to assist that destruction by preparing a specific path for it to follow, it would seem a thousand times worse.

“I think your records are incomplete.”

“Why’s that?” Garth asked, typing some equations into his proteus. So long as he kept the screen and the miniature keyboard away from any of Huey’s cameras, he’d be able to keep the AI in the dark until the last minute. His plan was gaining wings now, but there was always the possibility that Huey wouldn’t agree. Giving the rogue machine mind any hints about what he was planning before he was certain it would work would only give Huey more time to think up reasons not to do it, which wasn’t an option. There was so much that was going wrong with Hospitalis’ society that Garth knew he couldn’t do it on his own. He needed something or someone intelligent enough to run the op with him, and unless he could find a Latelian willing to possibly destroy the one thing that’d kept Latelian civilization from self-destructing thousands of years ago, Huey was it.

“Your medical records are missing.”

It’d been bound to happen sooner or later. Garth stopped his calculations and leaned back in his chair, cupping his head with his fingers interlaced at the neck. “How much do you know about where I came from before I joined Special Forces?”

“Well…” Huey gave a mental shrug. “Attached with your service records were some documents that were sealed and accessible only by Trinity personnel. It wasn’t difficult to defeat the security passwords, especially with me being rogue and all.”

Garth thought he heard a bit of braggadocio in Huey’s voice, but let it pass. “So you know that I was found in a spaceship ten thousand years older than the first recorded manned flight to Pluto.”

“I only know what the documents say, boss, and they do say that, yes.” Huey started loading the illegally obtained files onto the monitors for Garth to look at. He was especially excited by the assumption that the ship was made from alloys or metals stronger than anything in existence today, and by the possibility of a new form of energized fields that stopped time and made things invisible. “Is all of this true?”

The data was very precise and ordered, and completely lacking anything resembling bias. For all of his reprehensible actions, Kant Ingrams had compiled his report with a jeweler’s precision. “If you read through the entire thing, then you know that I’ve got amnesia.”

“Yeah, a freakishly bizarre, inexplicable form of memory loss that kept you from remembering even the simplest thing about home but didn’t prevent you from turning the science of gravity technology upside down or from hacking a supposedly impossible to hack AI, not once, but twice. Oh yeah, and it seems to be fading, boss.” Huey said exuberantly. “Lots of people’d miss it, even if they did have access to all of these effing files, but I got nothing but time on my hands, and I have to say it looks like you’re slowly coming to. Then, there’s the holorecordings of your ship. I compared them to the Box, and they’re really, really similar, so you’re not wrong about that, either.”

Garth held up a hand. “I think we’re getting sidetracked here. You already know why I’m on Hospitalis. You wanted to know about my missing medical records”

“Well, yes, but …”

“There are no medical files.” Garth interrupted Huey again. “I was never wounded on the field.”

Huey re-examined the video footage he’d already digested, this time paying particular attention to those moments where Garth had fallen under hostile fire or had been in dangerous situations. “I haven’t looked at all the field recordings yet, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t hurt.”

“You can do all that later on. All you’ll find is that I’m not lying. I was never hurt.”

“Okay,” Huey said, willing to concede the point until he had an opportunity to do exactly that, “but I do have video footage of you keeping up with the rest of your team during forced marches. I do have footage of you lifting an armored vehicle by yourself. And other things like that. Before you interrupt me, I have gone over the detailed medical examinations Kant performed on you, and I know his conclusions. He filed a report with the Trinity government claiming that you and the others had undergone some kind of physical gene therapy in the 24^th century that might have been a precursor to the battle augmentations in use today. He also said that, in his estimation, whatever genetic modifications you had done to you weren’t anywhere near the efficacy of even level one body modification. The limited reports from Forces medical personnel indicates that your physical condition was very different from when you awoke, and that, in their estimation, you were –at that time- undergoing some kind of rapid physical mutation. They couldn’t prove it because of that thing you did to them, but they totally thought you were somehow managing to upgrade yourself genetically. From what I can tell on these tapes, your other team members, the heavy infantrymen especially, had some serious work done. And yet you actually managed to outlift them by at least ten thousand kilos on more than one occasion. Basically, I wanna know what the fuck you are.”

Garth made a mental note. When he got finished with Hospitalis and the Box, he was going to have to find a way to get rid of all the copies of those battlefield recordings. He’d never been particularly thrilled with the 24-7 recordings to begin with, but he’d never once been in a position to prevent them from being taken; even his solo missions, where he’d gone undercover, had been recorded to protect Trinity. It was a horrible breach of personal security, and as he saw with Huey’s reaction, it did him absolutely no good. One or two or even a dozen people might miss the fact that he’d never opted for the body modifications the other Special Forces operatives took, but sooner or later someone would notice exactly the same things Huey had. The only thing he had going for him was that the doctors on 9-Nova would keep their mouths shut for the rest of their lives. “I don’t really know, Huey.”

“How can you not know what you are?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m human, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He felt human, looked human, had dreams that human beings had, and for all intents and purposes, he came from a point in human history where the first interactions with alien races were still hundreds of years off. There was a possibility he was a clone, or an engineered being like Kant thought, but it didn’t diminish the fact that he felt human. “I mean, I am human. I know it.”

“So what about these supposedly useless body modifications Kant Ingrams found evidence of, and you’re mystery strength?” Huey demanded. “What about them?”

“Only thing I can say is maybe his equipment wasn’t good enough to detect the subtleties of the work.” The first time he’d done something that should have been impossible without the heavy-duty body modification that was standard requirement for Special Forces field duty, he’d almost lost a leg by freaking out. But others had seen it happen, and had accepted it without reservation. No one in the field cared one way or the other how something was done, just so long as it got done

Later, when other … symptoms … of his inexplicable talents began manifesting themselves Garth had found himself in the unenviable position of being ‘volunteered’ for point man on every ground assault. In addition to stronger than normal strength and all the requisite modifiers that came with it, Garth had some kind of sixth sense when it came to danger; even the slightest subconscious hint of danger made it impossible to relax or think about anything other than discovering the source of his unease. During one of his earliest missions, he’d hunted through an entire village to stop the tingle along his spine, eventually locating and disarming a bomb large enough to turn ten square miles of real estate into smoking glass and carbon ash

Garth N’Chalez knew he was a human being, but he didn’t know what kind of human being.

Huey read Kant’s notes, reread the files pertaining to Tynedale/Fujihara’s initial scans of Pluto. The procedures used by T/F to plumb the depths of Pluto’s body were standard and had been in practice for hundreds of years, the machines demilitarized deep-space scanners originally used to hunt for pirates very skilled at escaping detection. The graphs and reproductions of the inner planet were high-definition, and showed no sign of a ship anywhere. And yet there it had been, and here Garth was. “All right, assuming that this is true, you have any idea what your upper limits are? I mean, pretending for the time being that the same level of technology that made your ship invisible and let fifteen people sleep unharmed through ten thousand years went into your implants or augments or whatever they are.”

“Truthfully, I don’t know.” The video footage Huey was talking about, where he’d picked up an armored car and turned it upside was the last time he’d ever done something like that, but he still felt the power of that moment coiled under his skin, waiting to be unleashed.

“All right. So you’re freakishly strong and ten thousand years old and have never been hurt or sick a day in your life.” Huey said, trying to lighten the mood. “But what have you done for me lately?”

Garth stifled a laugh. He looked at the output his proteus was providing based on his first series of equations and he liked what he saw. He’d need Huey’s help to iron out some of the more complex portions of the plan, but he was certain it was going to work. As long as Huey climbed on board. “I have a plan, but it’s going to take a few more tracks to lay down. Before I tell you, you’ve gotta promise to listen with an open mind and understand that this is the kind of thing I used to do for a living.”

It’d taken a surprisingly small amount of coercion on Garth’s part to get Huey on board with his idea. Leaving Huey to crunch the numbers to work up a far more precise plan of attack gave Garth the opportunity to get on with the rest of his day; there was less than two hours left before he had to be at the weigh-in at some location in Central City. Garth wasn’t looking forward to it because the press was going to be there. He was going to be photographed about a zillion times, and he was undoubtedly going to be expected to speak. His name and his face was going to be plastered all over the media channels, not just on Hospitalis, but throughout the entire system, and the goddamn press kits and collectibles the gameheads were going to buy would put his TV-Q at an unacceptable saturation rate. Unless he could get Huey out of his imprisonment and into a location where he could help him with surveillance, doing anything covert was going to be absolutely impossible.

Jimmy pulled the cab up outside the port. When Garth climbed into the back seat, he pulled away quickly and headed off towards Central. “Sa Garth, I did all of the things you wanted, but …”

“You feel uncomfortable.” Garth nodded understandingly, catching and holding Jimmy’s eye in the mirror. “I don’t blame you.”

“I mean, industrial strength adhesive tape, a hundred meters of black nylon rope, a thousand titanium climbing pitons? Four hundred meters of duronium wiring? What’s all this for?” Jimmy took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “You’re not asking me to do anything illegal, are you?”

“Not at all.” Garth replied casually. “You were outside the Hotel, you saw all the guys there. All of them are my competition.”

“I mean, if all you’re doing is buying stuff to sorta, you know, take some of those guys out of the running, that’s one thing, but I gotta tell you, sa, the person I bought this stuff from gave me a funny look.”

“That’s because he was trying to figure out what in the world someone could use all of it for in connection with each other. Haven’t you ever gone into a grocery store and bought all the weird little items you forget to pick up on a regular trip? Like toothpaste and underwear and, oh, I dunno, a steak? Same look, I bet.”

Jimmy thought about that for a long while, driving moodily along the freeway. As a gamehead, he wanted to have more information than the next guy, and had stooped to some pretty interesting lows in order to get the upper hand on betting. He didn’t know a person who wouldn’t. “You gonna kill some of those guys?”

Garth shrugged. “Would it bother you?”

The cabbie burst out laughing. “Not really, no.” He smiled, conscience eased. “I got that storage room you wanted, too. Big enough for you to train in, just like you asked. I had to put my name on the lease, but you’re listed as a person who can go in and out, so if you’re gonna kill anybody, don’t do it there. I put all the stuff you asked for in there before coming to pick you up. Here’s the info.”

“Awesome.” Garth relaxed as the data entered his proteus. For a minute there he’d been certain Jimmy was going to go the other way on him, which would have been a shame.

“You really own your own spaceship?” Jimmy asked after a few more minutes of silent driving.

“If you can call it one.” Garth shook his head unhappily. “It’s a hunk of junk, and the AI is going crazy.”

“You got an AI on that thing?” Jimmy couldn’t even imagine what it was like to own an AI. Some of the new shows on television were comedies set in Trinityspace, but he doubted a real artificial intelligence was as, well, as stupid.

“Sure do.” Garth laughed, and leaned forward on the seat. “You wanna hear something funny? Your government is trying to drive it crazy so it commits suicide or some crazy damned thing. Isn’t that a laugh?”

Jimmy did indeed think that was one of the funniest things he’d ever heard. “Is it working?”

“I really think it is. Tried to fire the engines while I was inside.”

“Get out!” Jimmy looked sidelong at Garth, who was the picture of deadly serious dismay. “What happened?”

“I managed to stop it in time, but I gotta tell you, Jimmy, I for sure think that son of a bitch is going to try and kill himself any day now.” Garth shook his head. “I’d hate to lose that ship, you know? I spent a lot of money on it. And I’m pretty sure the Chairwoman’d be pissed if the Space Port blew up.”

“Well sure.” Jimmy owned his cab, and he knew just how he’d feel if something happened to it. Losing the cab would be like losing a part of the family. And when his wife found out, he’d probably lose his life as well. “Anything you can do?”

“Not really. I mean, it’s an AI, right? Nothing can stop an AI from going crazy and trying to kill stuff, you know what I mean?” Garth snapped his fingers. “I know what I could do, though!”

“Yeah?”

“Look, my ship’s a big one. It’s crappy, sure, but it’s got some pretty big-ass engines on there that’ll cause a lot of damage if the ship blows up. I managed to stop the fucking thing today, but only because I got there in time.”

“How big are the engines?” Jimmy asked, worried.

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. Big enough to push a ship through space. Big enough to maybe blow up part of the space port.”

“You got to tell the government!”

“Yeah, I should.” Garth sat back down, pretending to mull the idea over. He rolled his head on the head rest, obviously very unhappy. “Only thing is, they’d prolly make me leave before I even get to start the Contest.”

Jimmy felt a wave of depression sweep over him when he realized Garth was right; he was a stand-up sort of person, but he was still an Offworlder. Jimmy really didn’t care one way or the other if Garth came from Trinity or if he was an alien in disguise. What mattered was that he’d already confided in his horrible wife that he had the inside track on the man to win the Offworld portion of the Contest. He’d managed to convince her to promise she’d put some of her own personal money on the wagers. By now, the word had probably spread to the rest of her extended family, and some of those guys weren’t the sorts of people you wanted mad. If Garth went to anyone in the government, they’d throw him out of the system so fast it wouldn’t even be funny. “What were you thinking you could do?”

“If I could only get onto the space port without anyone knowing about it, I bet I could really fix that ship so it won’t blow up at all. I’d of done it today, but they’re suspicious about me enough as it is. If they saw me monkeying around, I’d for sure get kicked out of Lately. I’d need a lot of metal, some cutting and welding tools, and enough time to make the adjustments.”

Jimmy sighed. “I might know some people who could help you out with that, sa. They’re pretty rough people, though.” His wife’s brothers. Jimmy shuddered. They were more than rough, but he was also very certain that Vernita had talked to them about Garth N’Chalez. He’d rather run the risk of being involved with an illegal activity and get away with it than have to explain to them why their sure thing was being deported.

Garth leaned towards Jimmy. “All I know is, Jimmy, that I want to fight in the Contest, and if that ship blows up or starts causing problems, it won’t happen. How long do you think this’ll take to set up?”

“These guys are going to want to meet you before they decide to do anything, Garth. A couple of days after that, probably. You’ll have to pay them.”

“I’d be suspicious if I didn’t.” Garth clapped the cabbie on the back. “You’re a good man, Jimmish. When this is all over, you’re going to be so rich you’ll never have to drive a cab again.” Satisfied that he’d managed to pull the wool over Jimmy’s eyes without too much trouble, Garth leaned back in the cab and set about enjoying the ride.

Jimmy, who was at heart a very unimaginative man, frowned at Garth’s prediction. “What would I do without my hack?”

Garth was tired and irritable, but he couldn’t rest. The weigh-in had been an utter catastrophe from the word ‘go’. For reasons that he couldn’t personally understand, the promoters for the system-wide event had opted to do the whole thing outside. For the first twenty minutes, things had gone smoothly, with the suave and well-toned announcer whipping the resulting crowd of reporters and gawkers into a respectable frenzy of interest. It was, after all, a show, and if they didn’t get enough viewers from the beginning then there was little or no hope that the Offworld collectibles would move.

And then a riot had started.

Hundreds, possibly as many as a thousand ‘civilians’, had started trying to push their way past the sloppily built barricades to get at the Offworlders. Since no one could have possibly predicted that the normally peaceful Latelians –their dislike for many of the Chairwoman’s policies notwithstanding- would go off the wall like that, the police presence had been appropriate to what should have been a non-issue. The cops, a token presence to satisfy legal requirements, were buried in the first wave.

Reacting decisively, Chairwoman Doans released the hounds. Or in her case, God soldiers.

Garth had never seen anything like a God soldier in his entire tour of duty for Special Forces, and he’d seen things in the field that still made his hair stand on end and his skin crawl when he stopped to think about it. From his vantage point safely behind a shatter-proof wall dropped into place seconds before the soldiers had made their official presence known, Garth had watched the infantry mow through the crowd with absolute disregard for human life. There were no tactics displayed during those first initial moments because there hadn’t needed to be any; relying on their massive size and frightening appearance, the God soldiers had subdued the easy ones without harm before moving on to more violent measures to deal with the core group of instigators.

The average God soldier, and Garth had counted fifty of the monolithic warriors swarming through the crowd, stood no smaller than ten feet tall, and was easily half as wide and so densely muscled that there had to be little or no room at all for organic organs.

Having spent more than enough time in the company of cyborgs and other, similarly enhanced beings, Garth recognized the tell-tale fluidic grace of people so completely remodeled underneath the skin that they were more machine than Man. The God soldiers moved slowly, almost with great effort and strain, unless they were called upon to respond to a crisis, in which case they moved so quickly that only someone trained to follow at such speeds would ever know what was truly going on.

The agitators who’d whipped the fragile crowd into a riot produced what Garth thought of as the Timeless Classic Riot Weapons; Molotov cocktails, shotguns, bricks, and other homemade implements. Terror weapons not really intended to do anything but make some kind of point, the only thing to have any effect was one of the cocktails; the huge freak, blanketed in a smothering blaze of fire, had paused just long enough to put himself out before pulling his antagonist’s head off.

By the time the main targets had been subdued into fine red paste on the sidewalk, some of the other, non-involved, rioters discovered the stones to get back into the fray. Rather than deal with these men and women on a hand-to-hand basis, the God soldiers deployed noxious gas grenades that dropped everyone other than them to the ground, vomiting and shitting themselves uncontrollably.

After the smoke had cleared, arrests were made, bodies were carted off, and formal statements issued to the press. Garth thought Chairwoman Doans, who’d shown up almost before the God soldiers, was a good-looking older woman who was also an incredibly talented spin doctor. Thirty seconds into her televised address, she had the public eating out of the palm of her hand by commandeering previously shot footage of the crowd moments before the riot had broken out. The evidence was abnormally clear; the Offworlders hadn’t engaged the crowd in any way, shape of form unless it was on the scale, or during an interview behind closed doors. The fault lay entirely with a few specific people in the crowd, and the deaths were on their hands.

Two things bothered Garth greatly. No, make that three.

One, the Chairwoman seemed abnormally willing to use her God soldiers against regular, hopelessly inadequate citizens. Actions like that hinted at tyranny or despotism, neither of which Garth enjoyed very much.

Two, the rioters, those men and women who’d actually started the demonstration, had to have known how the Chairwoman would respond; the appearance of the God soldiers had been so bloody quick that all fifty of the giant tank-people had to have been around the corner just waiting for the shit to hit the fan. That spoke of one or two possibilities; the first was that the mastermind behind the riot didn’t care one way or another that innocent people got hurt so long as their point –most likely some kind of anti-Offworld rhetorical drivel- got made. The second was that the event had been staged by the Chairwoman herself, which was also not very cool.

The third and most important thing that worried Garth so much that he doubted he’d ever sleep again was the realization that if his mission went poorly, he’d find himself face-to-face with a God soldier. Fantastic and mysterious strength notwithstanding, the average God soldier was fifteen times as big as Hercules and easily mean enough to eat babies.

2006-07-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

DAY FOUR:

THE SECRET LATELIAN PAST-TIME

It started over a glass of orange juice and ended with fifty dead, forty-seven injured, and ninety-two deported.

The armistice generated by the previous days’ introduction to the awesomely destructive abilities of the God soldier lasted throughout the night and into the morning hours, but it didn’t make it past breakfast. The assortment of men and women from a hundred different Trinity worlds were just too cocksure, arrogant, and interested in making a fast buck to let their petty grudges and stupid misconceptions stay quiet.

Garth, who’d spent his night plagued with incessant warnings of extreme danger and half-formed memories trying to take root in his subconscious, was sitting at the back of the banquet room when the argument turned from bad to catastrophic.

Two formerly friendly Contestants, one a swarthy IndoRussian mercenary-type with long scars down both his arms and the other a lithe, sinewy AfroEgyptian who with teeth filed into sharp points started bickering over some point of interest between the two of them. Already keenly primed for just this sort of thing, Garth picked up his breakfast and cup of coffee and made his way even further towards the back of the room. He hopped lithely onto a raised dais where he assumed gregarious Latelian product managers could discourse at great lengths about the wonders of the newest and greatest in merchandise while a vast horde of soldier-salesmen wolfed down enough food for a thousand people. As he made himself comfortable, a few of the other guys who’d been sitting at his table hastened to join him. A few of them bore expressions that said they didn’t quite understand what was going to happen but that they trusted Garth had a damned good reason for getting out of harms’ way.

Three seconds after the last Contestant sat down, cradling a plate of eggs in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, IndoRussian man launched his glass of orange juice at AfroEgyptian guy’s head, driving the rim of the container into his forehead. Bellowing in his native language, the dark-skinned mercenary jumped backwards, slamming clumsily into the table behind him.

From there, the chaos that ensued was very similar to watching a pile of carefully laid Dominos skitter and collide with one another; already fragile alliances splintered and were reformed as everyone suddenly found a reason to stab the nearest person with a fork or knife, or to sink teeth into exposed necks or to break arms and legs. Drawn by the shouts and screams, a group of Contestants from the other banquet hall across the way showed up at the door, and were immediately drawn into the conflict as they joined with friends and comrades.

Garth rolled his eyes at the debacle. If there were hidden cameras in the room –and he was as sure of that as anything- the footage was probably rolling out live to any number of gamehead-dedicated channels; when it came to violence, the Latelians were mad as hatters. He groaned in sympathetic pain when he saw a woman scoop out a guy’s eye with her spoon. “Son of a bitch, that had to hurt.”

“I would agree.”

Garth turned to look at who’d answered. Not surprisingly, it was one of the few people who struck Garth as a serious competitor. His new friend was a whipcord-lean EuroJay male in his late fifties who was, ironically enough, missing an eye. Garth remembered seeing the thin Offworlder on the periphery the day of his arrival, eyes hooded, contemplating as he was being contemplated. He stuck out a hand. “Garth.”

“Injiri.” The EuroJay clasped Garth’s hand and shook it once. He jerked his chin at the melee. “How did you know?”

“Most of these guys are idiots. Someone farts in the wrong direction and it’s liable to set off a fight.” Garth ducked as an errant serving plate came his way. “Why’d you follow?”

Injiri shrugged. “Like you, I’m here to fight in the Contest, to make money, to add to my resume. Those fools down there aren’t getting paid to fight right now. All they’re doing is letting those of us who are serious see their fighting styles.”

The two of them sat there in silence for awhile, each of them lost in their own thoughts about what they were witnessing. Garth wasn’t overly impressed with what he was seeing, even considering the likelihood that the cramped area of the banquet hall wasn’t really spacious enough for everyone to let loose and have at one another like they meant it. Closed quarter combat didn’t leave a lot of room for flair. It was kill or be killed. “What you do before this?” he asked after someone bit someone else’s ear off.

“Yellow Dog.” Injiri answered without hesitation. He’d spoken to a number of Contestants during transport, and knew that over half the people so far belonged to one criminal organization or another. “You?”

Injiri’s candor was impressive, if a little shocking. Yellow Dog was a major criminal organization exclusively populated by EuroJapanese families of noble birth, and they shared a great deal of their philosophies with ancient Earth yakuza and mafia tribes. They were notably chilly to anyone not in their cultural echelon, and were well-known for their extreme politeness even as they doled out their equally notorious bloody-handed justice to fools who got in their way. Operating from a number of Emperor-for-Life dominated planets –Garth had yet to discern just what that meant, because as far as he knew, the legendary ruler of the EuroJapanese people did not have sovereignty in Trinityspace- Yellow Dog had an amassed fortune that was quite impressive, as well as a reputation for being very thorough in all their dealings, which were hidden behind a series of impenetrable legal fronts. Many of the law enforcement agencies Garth had dealt with while under cover saw zero percentage in actively pursuing any charges against anyone –even the low man- in Yellow Dog, because not only was the EuroJapanese mafia unbearably powerful, they were patient and, again, incredibly thorough. Entire generations of glory-hungry or honest cops and their families vanished over night, twenty years or longer after the perceived insult to honor. For Injiri to so blithely mention his affiliation with Yellow Dog … it wasn’t unheard of, but it was practically asking for trouble, because practically everyone knew someone who’d been done over by one of their people.

“Glass Hammer.” Garth answered after a respectable pause. In the grand scheme of things, Glass Hammer –a small organization limited to a handful of systems and more mercenary than mercantile- was barely a blip on the Dog’s radar. Respectable enough in their own right, but beneath notice.

Injiri jerked his chin again, this time at a burly IndoRussian big enough to qualify as Latelian. “That’s Marko Devresh. He was friends with one of the men you fought the other day.”

Garth watched Marko clobber two smaller men with a haymaker each. “Oh yeah? Which one?”

“The one you killed.” Injiri snatched a croissant out of the air as it flew by his head. “He is very unhappy with you.” He started eating the croissant, letting Garth know through his posture that he wouldn’t answer any questions. That, he hadn’t, in fact, said anything.

It was around this time that the law enforcement responded to the raging conflict by literally blowing the doors of the hinges and rushing into the room en masse. The front lines were protected by large see-through shields that they used to shove the first row of unruly Contestants into the ground; the officers behind the shield-bearers smacked each of the fallen warriors solidly in the head with stun batons. Another sally of cops followed fifteen seconds behind the first and tossed the unconscious Contestants into the arms of brothers in blue/grey, who dragged them into waiting paddy wagons.

Things continued on in that vein for ten more minutes, the shield-bearers doubling their numbers as the crowd began to thin out. When the Contestants stopped trying to kill each other and turned their attention on the officers, policemen hovering on the edge of freshly destroyed wall produced shoulder-mounted cannons and began deploying non-lethal rounds at the remaining thirty or forty rioters.

The first of the basketball sized beanbags nearly tore the head off one man, and the second one aimed his way struck him in the chest with enough impact to break all his ribs. The cannons continued to fire dozens of the over large pacifiers at the resisters until they all stopped moving.

“Fuck me sideways.” Garth closed off his sense of smell as the odor of death, mingled with the harsh accelerants used to fire the ‘non-lethal’ projectiles, threatened to crowd his senses. Against his better judgment, Garth was impressed with the response.

Injiri nodded in agreement. “That was very … efficient.”

Scores of emergency response teams flooded into the destroyed banquet hall as the police officers filed out. They started moving quickly and efficiently through the room, separating the living from the dead, the seriously wounded from those needing a few bandages and a pat on the head. Garth recognized the woman who’d spoken with him over Firnkle’s corpse. She walked through the rows of the dead, clearly taking pictures with her proteus, stopping only when some inner sense warned her she was being watched. Reywin straightened up and looked straight at Garth, who waved back.

Injiri nudged Garth and nodded towards the doors. “Government.”

Sure enough, five impeccably dressed, perfectly manicured men strode into the room, their eyes covered with sunglasses and the cut of their dark blue suits so sharp they sliced the air into shreds. They stood just inside the room, swiveling their heads back and forth until they found their target. When it became clear they were walking towards the dais, all of the other Contestants, Injiri included, found better things to do, dematerializing so quickly Garth swore he heard air rush in to fill the vacuum.

Garth drank his coffee, patiently waiting for them to come to him. It wasn’t worth his time to worry about them showing up because he’d been expecting them, sooner or later. They weren’t there to bust him for breaking any laws; the dead guys he’d killed the day before didn’t warrant the attention of Special Agents. That was a local matter for local cops, and it was equally stupid to imagine the Contest promoters had the kind of cachet to rustle up some agents to force their number one pain in the ass to follow their ultra-lame itinerary.

Dollars to donuts said his titular claim for the Box had reached the ears of someone powerful, and paranoid; this alleged someone undoubtedly wanted the foreign devil making such ridiculous pronouncements shut down, quickly, quietly, and without any undue fuss.

“Garth N’Chalez?” The one in the lead asked, mangling the last name.

“I’m wearing his underwear.” Garth smiled politely, wondering just how much the operation to have their sense of humor surgically removed had cost.

“Come with us please.”

Garth made his way slowly, gently, off the dais. Some of the rioters were beginning to regain consciousness and looked like they were going to start kicking up a fuss, and the last thing Garth wanted was to panic the detail assigned to escort him wherever; having a basketball sized beanbag fired at his head with enough force to punch through a wall was not a good way to start the morning. “You wanna handcuff me or anything?” he asked when he was down.

“No need.” The agents arranged themselves around Garth and escorted him out of the building.

As they passed the front desk, Si Mijomi launched another one of her patented gargoyle smiles at him.

The five agents hustled Garth into a waiting hovercar and strapped him firmly into the seat. If they hadn’t been dead set on doing thing their way, Garth would have readily announced his willingness to behave. But, since they were working their hardest to make his life as miserable as they could, Garth didn’t fuss when they tightened the last restraint up to the point where stones would have bled.

The car took off with a faint hum of AG turbines. When they were aloft, one of the agents, the same one who’d addressed Garth in the banquet hall, turned towards him, a shimmery metal hood in his hands. “This is a duronium hood, Mr. N’Chalez. It is more for our benefit than yours. We would like you to agree to wear it.”

“Why are you even asking?” Garth indicated his securely stowed body. “It’s not like I can refuse.”

“A preliminary report from the body of the man you struck indicates that the restraints aren’t sufficient to hold you in place for very long.” The agent smiled thinly. “We are aware that you are coming along willingly, and that if you wanted, you could free yourself in short order.” He gestured, and the pilot took up a holding pattern a few miles above the Hotel. “We are asking that you put the hood on to protect our confidence with the people of Hospitalis. If you agree to wear the hood, it will be placed over your head and left to rest. If you choose not to put the hood on, it will be done so, only very tightly.”

“I get it.” An interesting picture was beginning to develop. Garth was glad he’d agreed to go along willingly. “You’re taking me to see someone who shouldn’t be connected with me. All right, I’ll wear the hood.”

The agent seemed relieved, and when he was sure Garth wasn’t going to pull any tricks, slid the metallic hood over his head. “The hood,” the agent explained as the car began moving again, “is made out of duronium and keyed to my DNA. Attempting to remove the hood the first time will result in it tightening around your neck. The second time will cause it to cinch up enough to restrict your breathing until you are unconscious. A third time will decapitate. This particular bag has been rated for a God soldier, so even though you are stronger than you appear, it is unlikely in the extreme that you will manage to breach its integrity before you are killed. If by some chance you manage the impossible, the pilot is instructed to drive this vehicle directly into the ground, where it, and anyone surviving the initial crash, will be consumed in an explosion powerful enough to turn us into dust.”

“You guys have got your skills down pat.” Garth said with an appreciation he didn’t feel. The idiots had given away their hand by showing their willingness to die in order to protect the identity of the person who wanted to see him; the only sort of person able to demand that kind of loyalty was someone high up in the food chain, either governmental or military. In either case, the alleged someone had probably come in contact with his extensive dossier, and was looking to ask –or force- him to do something he probably didn’t want to do. The smart money was on one of Chairwoman Doans’ underlings; after the dirt Jimmish had dished on the woman’s popularity amongst her own supporters, Garth was willing to bet that all legal options of ousting her from office were either too lengthy or not terminal enough for their liking.

Who better to get rid of an unwanted, powerful official than a highly trained Offworld operative who’s specialty was doing just that sort of thing?

If any of the agents took his compliment for what it was, they didn’t say anything in return.

When they arrived at their destination, the men led Garth through an intentionally confusing route that took them up and down stairs, through innumerable doorways, across a long stretch of unbroken interior, and back again, using a different route. They used four different elevators that operated at four different speeds and at least three different escalators before deciding the rigmarole had been sufficient enough to disguise their location inside the building.

Garth, who’d been struggling to identify distinct sounds the moment he’d stepped out of the car, was at a complete loss as to where he was; the killer hood had obviously been built to disorient him just enough so he couldn’t tell up from down or left from right. Should the need arise for him to hotfoot it out of the place, Garth was going to have to rely on good old-fashioned running away quickly.

“Sit here.” Chatty Agent guided Garth to a chair and removed the hood.

Garth sat still and waited for his eyes to adjust to the light. The moment he could discern individual shapes, he beamed from ear to ear. He was in the private offices of someone with a great deal of political power; the wall behind the other seat in the room was ornamented with the Latelian Seal of Office, a ridiculously idealized Box surrounded by stars meant to indicate the number of worlds under Latelian control. Other than terribly patriotic, it was down-right ugly with a capital Ugh. One wall of the room was dominated by an old-fashioned case sporting very thick volumes that Garth took to be the printed matter of the Latelian legal system. The only other wall to bear any adornments played host to a number of impressive looking plaques proclaiming someone named Terrance Curtis to be just about every-damned-thing a guy could be, from Varsity Champion to OverSecretary. His eager-beaver Latelian buddy was second in command of the entire Latelian populace, and was just the sort of cat who’d find it expedient to break the laws to make the laws.

A few seconds later, the man who’d contrived to bring him into his presence walked into the room. Like most Latelians, he was over seven feet tall, and carried himself with the aura of someone used to command. He seated himself, and nodded to the agents standing on either side of Garth.

“For reasons of national security,” the same agent who’d talked to him throughout their journey removed Garth’s proteus with a well-practiced maneuver, “we are required to process your proteus for data packets that may reveal the location of this meeting, or the OverSecretary’s identity. It will be returned to you at the end of the meeting.”

Garth didn’t point out that it would have made more sense to take his proteus off at the Hotel and leave it there. He hoped they didn’t think he was stupid enough to imagine that his proteus would be returned to him un-doctored. “Sure, fine. Do what you gotta do.”

At another nod from the OverSecretary, the agents left the room, warning Garth that he was under surveillance and that if he did anything foolish, nothing short of a miracle would see him through to the end of the day.

OverSecretary Terrance smiled with warmth he didn’t feel. “I trust your trip here was comfortable.”

“More or less, uhuh.”

The OverSecretary perused some data from one of the Screens built into his desk. “According to the logs of your entrance into our system, you have come here to fight in the Contest.”

Garth didn’t say anything. He had no intention of divulging anything that might get him into trouble.

Terrance narrowed his eyes thoughtfully at Garth’s stoic approach, and felt the smallest bit of appreciation for the man. “As part of the exchange of information between your vessel and the space station, it was revealed that you are a member of Special Forces, a paramilitary organization working indirectly for the Trinity government. An organization whose sole purpose is to either soften up a society so one particular local body of governors or another can take control or to dampen outright civil war in a manner that might not be overly popular. Is this true?”

“No.” Garth saw how deftly the OverSecretary quashed the surge of irritation that flared briefly in his eyes.

“You are not a member of Special Forces?” Terrance sent the information he was examining to a Sheet on the wall and waited for Garth’s response.

Garth read some of the documents passing on the Sheet with interest; since finishing his tour of duty, he hadn’t taken the time to go through all the textual material to find out just what his instructors and commanding officers thought of his performance. When he was satisfied that the OverSecretary had waited long enough, he explained his previous answer. “I don’t know how complete the information you got was, sa, but I can tell you with all honesty that I am no longer a member of Special Forces. I quit several months ago.”

Terrance knew very well what the documentation said, but he didn’t believe it for a second. He said as much to Garth, adding, “Your presence here at this time is too difficult to dismiss as mere happenstance, sa. You’ve been planetside for several days now. What is your opinion of Hospitalis?”

“It’s a very nice place, Sa OverSecretary.” The effect Garth’s banality had on the man was immediate.

“Do not play games with me, Sa N’Chalez.” OverSecretary Terrance said with a deep rumble. “I am second only to the Chairwoman herself, and if I so wish, you will not leave this room alive. I asked you a question, and I am certain you plumbed the true question. I ask again, what is your professional opinion of Hospitalis?”

“You’re on the brink of civil disobedience on a massive scale, OverSecretary, maybe even a war. As I understand it, the introduction of the Offworld component to your Contest five years ago was done in an effort to smooth some of the more turbulent waters, and to maybe get people accustomed to the idea of the reality that Lately isn’t alone in the universe. In theory, it makes sense because as near as I can tell, the Contest is immensely popular. Oh yeah, and the fact that there’s like, a thousand to one ratio in favor of Trinityspace.”

“In practice?” OverSecretary Terrance asked, eyes glittering.

“I’d have to say that things aren’t going as the Chairwoman planned. There’s a notable presence of anti-Offworld sentiment coming from people who are in a position to foment that particular brand of chaos. Doesn’t matter that Port City’s home to a bunch of legal immigrants, either. The riot the other day at the weigh-in proves that, and the Chairwoman’s heavy-handed responses are only going to fuck things up worse.” Garth gave the OverSecretary a few seconds to chew on that before continuing. “Then there’s your military, which is hugely bloated and probably over budget across all the boards. It’s supposedly been in the process of ‘standing down’ for around a hundred years, which you gotta know is way too long. I don’t know how many wars and on which fronts you fought over the preceding centuries, but I do know that you’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million soldiers, most of them those freakishly enormous God soldiers. The pressures and stresses from a military with nothing to do and nowhere to go are well-documented, Sa OverSecretary. If the Chairwoman isn’t careful in her dealings with the military commanders, you could very well be looking at a coup de tat in a couple years, and that ain’t a pretty sight. If the military honchos don’t decide to take charge and actually do start discharging troops en masse into gen pop, you’re looking at a problem that won’t ever go away. Men and women who’ve spent their entire lives in the rigid structure of a military environment do not transition well. The burden on your social and economic backbones will be immense.”

“My son happens to be one of those freakishly large God soldiers.” The OverSecretary snapped. He looked apologetic, but didn’t offer any words. “You’ve only been on the planet for a few days, Sa Garth. How on earth did you come to so many conclusions?”

“Am I wrong?”

Terrance raised a hand. “Pretend for the moment that this is just an exercise in curiosity. Tell me how you came to those assumptions.”

“Television, mostly.” The admission bounced off the OverSecretary’s blank face. “The journey from Smash All Infidels to Hospitalis took me over a week, OverSecretary. Your ‘airspace’ is alive with thousands of broadcast new channels, entertainment, and music. The number of active soldiers is a guess based on previous numbers of God soldiers joining in the Contest over the past hundred years. The figure of those … guys … making it through to the final round has gone from four or five to all of them. This leads me to believe that the preliminary trials, which start with as many as forty thousand Contestants, are dominated by God soldiers, and it’s only a hop, skip and a jump from there to forty million.

As for the Chairwoman’s decisions to introduce us filthy foreign devils into the Contest, well, it makes perfect sense. With the kind of troubles you’ve got brewing on the horizon, the safe bet is on letting Trinity have some kind of vested interest in this place continuing on as it has. The best way to make that kind of crappy decision palatable to a pack of paranoid xenophobes is to put the people you apparently loathe into the one thing you can all agree is one hell of a good time. Sooner or later, Contest viewers are gonna get all rubbery in the knees when their favorite Offworlder gets on the Screen to kick some ass. As for the Chairwoman’s popularity? You got to watch more television, OverSecretary, connect with the little people more often. Some of the shows out there’ve got satire down to a fine art. You, her, some of the military leaders, you’re all lambasted on a regular basis. In some corners, you’re all hated just as much as Offworlders. The rest? Historical knowledge, mostly.”

“Trinity has no history, Sa Garth.” OverSecretary Terrance snapped chillingly. “What is your basis for comparison?”

Garth wanted to tell the OverSecretary that his insights came from time spent on the job, but that wasn’t anywhere near the truth: the truth was too weird for even him to explain. Sometime during his speech, his words of wisdom had skipped tracks from guesswork to ideas based on personal memories, memories that were once again hidden.

The OverSecretary took Garth’s inability to answer as an admission of guilt. “Let me be candid, Sa Garth. I’m all too aware that many of the Chairwoman’s policies aren’t the best thing for this system, but in a number of ways I’m hampered from acting directly against her. This doesn’t mean I don’t agree with her fundamental platform; I do. Only fools and the blind willfully ignore the evidence put in front of them. We haven’t been completely annexed by Trinity, and I don’t think it’ll ever happen in the form of a military strike. Culturally, though, you Trinityfolk are more socially advanced than we are, and there are things you have that we do not.”

“AI.”

Terrance nodded. “Precisely. Our programmers are among the best in the known Universe, sa, especially in the last fifty years. Many of our top programmers are leaving our borders to work for Conglomerates who deal with AI personality constructs and some of the more esoteric software they run.”

“Deny them permission to leave.”

“We can’t. Many of the Conglomerates have iron-clad contracts with our government. The … benefits … brought to the table are too great to ignore at this time.”

Government kickbacks were as old as Roman roads and Garth decided he’d done enough dancing. It was time for the politician to put up or shut up. “Why am I here, OverSecretary?”

“A number of reasons, truthfully.” Terrance accessed one of the files he’d received yesterday and put it up on the Screen for Garth to read. “I received a communication from one our legal avatars yesterday. It seems that a Sa Herrig DuPont was in the process of filing a motion on your behalf. The focus of the motion was to prove that you are the inheritor of our Box.”

“Was?” Garth asked quizzically.

“The claim was squashed before it could be brought to the attention of someone in the media. The last thing this system needs is a ludicrous attempt at bypassing the Contest.”

At great cost, Garth controlled the urge to curse. The people on Hospitalis were so boneheaded it wasn’t even funny. The right thing to do would be to just let him try and open the Box on the sly, without anyone being the wiser; if something happened, they could pretend it hadn’t. Anything he did now would almost certainly garner the attention of the very same media groups Terrance was worried about, and that would for damned sure cause a boatload of problems, the least of which would be unhappy phonecalls. Garth took a deep breath. “I provided Sa Herrig with a number of details concerning the Box that couldn’t come from any source other than direct, personal contact over an extended period of time, Sa OverSecretary. Furthermore, the circumstances surrounding my own introduction into Trinity’s society are …”

“Are independently validated from fourteen individual requests for the data from an equal number of sources in Trinityspace and also incredibly well-forged.” Terrance smiled at the Offworlder’s discomfort. “So well-forged, in fact, that I am inclined to believe that for the first time in our agreement with the Trinity AI, it has decided to deal with us directly instead of through the usual, indirect channels. Over the past two and a half thousand years, agents from a number of systems have attempted to breach our borders, and the trail has always gone no further than a local government decision. In your case, though, the data is perfect; I’ve seen footage of your ‘interrogation’ and again, independent analysis says that either you are in fact ten thousand years old or Trinity has decided it wants our Box and has concocted an incredibly devious scheme to lay its ‘hands’ on it. As for the data you provided, we made highly detailed recordings of the Box and information similar to what you gave Sa Herrig available to an individual several years ago. If you were not given this information directly by this man, then you simply stole it and have come here for the purposes of exploitation.” Terrance grinned. “Either way, you fit a profile I require.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Garth admitted forlornly, sagging deeply into the chair. If OverSecretary Terrance wasn’t looking for someone to assassinate Chairwoman Doans outright, he was definitely in the market for some kind of mayhem.

“There is nothing to say, Sa Garth N’Chalez. The evidence that you are here to perform some act of sabotage for the Trinity AI is indisputable. You have no doubt realized that you are still alive because there is something I want you to do for me. In exchange, your other legal request will be granted without reservation.”

Garth’s options were very clear. If he tried to escape from, he’d be gone like the Dodo inside of five minutes, but it wouldn’t do him a lot of good; as the number two honcho in Latelyspace, the OverSecretary could make his life miserable with a few phone calls, and Garth didn’t relish the idea of being chased down the street by a marauding band of twelve foot tall ogres. To make it worse, the ultradense infosphere on Hospitalis would have his mug pasted onto every prote from Timbuktu to Shangri-La.

It wouldn’t even be as simple as agreeing to the man’s demands and then later pulling a fast one. It’d give him time to get off-planet, but from there, things actually got much worse; the Q-Tunnel would be loyal to the government so there was no escape out-system. There was also that three mile long transpo ship hanging around in deep space, crammed to the rafters with blood thirsty fighter pilots to contend with. The only possibility that remained open was direct travel to the neighboring system, and without access to a Tunnel, he was looking at four hundred years or more.

On the other hand, agreeing to work for the OverSec would give him the opportunity to have access to some form of Intelligence, and he could use whatever covert status to allay anyone’s suspicions concerning his true mission. Anything the OverSecretary wanted done would for damn sure be like kicking over an anthill, but when it came right down to it, getting into the ship was the most important thing on his mind. Having to dodge the occasional angry mob would be well worth the hassle if working with –at least on paper- the OverSecretary took him one step closer to his goal.

“What is it you want me to do?” Garth asked after a moment’s hesitation. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to con a politician, but it wasn’t until the OverSecretary relaxed for a microsecond that Garth felt confident he’d snowed the man under. He’d gambled that Terrance was genuine in his desires to paint Doans in a bad light rather than trying to catch a suspected Trinity Agent with his pants down and had won. Getting out alive was assured.

“For now, nothing.” OverSecretary Terrance rested his hands loosely on the table. “The situation we are waiting for has not yet arrived. It may not present itself at all, in which case you’ll either attempt to go back to your original mission parameters or choose to leave Lately in one piece.”

Garth appreciated the OverSecretary’s warning. He’d’ve been shocked to the marrow if the politician hadn’t threatened him. “When do I become a citizen?”

“The moment you return to the Hotel, your proteus will receive confirmation of your changed status. It’s provisional, which means that you won’t be accorded the rights and privileges of a full citizen, but it will prevent you from being accosted by local law enforcement.” Terrance smiled, genuinely this time, pleased that the meeting had gone the way that it had. “There will be a packet of information concerning the rights you will be granted.”

“And?” Garth quirked an eyebrow. When Terrance didn’t respond, Garth pressed the point. Learning that whatever task he was expected to do wasn’t might not happen at all wasn’t upsetting. The opportunity to work under the noses of government agencies was too powerful a lure to ignore, so if he was going to get the permission, he had to strike now, while the iron was hot. “If I’m going to be doing something … covert … for you, I think it would be in your best interests if I’m permitted to operate unimpeded in certain areas. I mean, if I’m expected to move like the wind and stay hidden in plain sight, that is.” “Your proteus has already been upgraded to military class, giving you access to some few areas of intelligence as well as some software and hardware not available to the general population.” Terrance raised a finger in warning. “I do not give this to you lightly, Sa Garth. Even though your machine will have only restricted access, the data and functions you’ll have at your command could cause problems for the locals. I’ve done this as a show of faith. I am well aware of your ability to wear two faces, even when looking in a mirror. You would do well to use the proteus sparingly, and to live with the reality that as long as you are in Latelyspace, you no longer work for the Trinity AI.”

“Well,” Garth said, puffing out a breath he’d been holding, “that sounds wonderful.”

OverSecretary Terrance rose. “One more thing, Sa Garth. I’ve informed the Contest people that they’re to step back from you a bit. I understand your handler was a bit overzealous the other day. It’s obvious from your background you have no need to train for the competition, or to waste your time with the tedious chore of being led around like a child. You’ve already shown your willingness to behave, so I don’t think there’s any need to worry. Do you?”

Nonplussed, Garth shook his head. The OverSecretary left the room through the same door he’d come in through.

Intel. He needed more Intel than he had, and the longer he was on the ground and running without a continual stream of analytical data, the greater the chance he was going to miss something critical. Garth didn’t think he’d misread the Terrance’s intentions, but with career politicos it was damned hard to tell what was going on beneath the surface. It was possible that he’d been the one lied to instead of the other way around, and that laid a shiver of worry down his spine. He needed Huey, and he needed him sooner than later.

Mulling over the risks of pushing Jimmy to hurry his contacts along, Garth waited patiently for the agents to return with his new proteus.

Following another unspoken command, the pilot of the hovercar slowed to a halt in roughly the same place they’d occupied about an hour ago. The duronium hood was removed. “Sa N’Chalez.”

“Uhuh.” Garth peered out the window. Two hundred feet below them, a small crowd of Contestants from the hotel were gathering a safe distance away from the supposed point of impact and were eagerly awaiting some kind of splash. True to the spirit of the group, Garth thought he saw bets being laid, which cheered him in a sort of nihilistic way.

“The OverSecretary has placed an inordinate amount of trust in you. Trust, I must admit, that I don’t share, especially in light of your training.”

“Uhuh.” Wishing he could get in on the action, Garth wondered what the odds were on his doing a face plant in the concrete.

“Pay attention, Sa N’Chalez.” The agent snapped. “Your life depends on it.” Again, working through telepathy or from a playbook, they launched upwards at a dizzying speed, leveling out when they’d gone up another four hundred feet. “I won’t claim to understand the reasons behind the OverSecretary’s decision to … use you, but he is a good man who wants the best for our people, and in that, I support him fully. Has he directed you to do anything yet?”

“No. Not yet.” The frightening thing about loyalty, Garth knew, was that even maniacs and lunatics were sufficiently charismatic to trick normally sane people into believing the craziest shit. Terrance didn’t seem to have any of the perquisite ticks and howling-at-the-moon kind of problems, but his poor judgment in hiring an ex-Special Forces saboteur to do his dirty work showed a startling lack of wisdom. Any gomer willing to work for such a man and endorse his philosophies needed to have a CAT scan.

“Excellent.” The agent nodded. “Your new proteus is a slightly modified military unit. Be careful who you let near it; there are numerous organizations working against the OverSecretary and the government who will be able to identify it as such, even though it is a physical duplicate of the one you recently bought. A foolish choice in trust will put your life in danger. At the OverSecretary’s command, you have been given access to some our more sophisticated software. This was done so that, when the time comes, you will be able to respond appropriately and minimize collateral damage and media saturation; our world is a complex one, with many layers, and something that may seem innocuous at the time could be your downfall. It was not given to you so that you can compile data that Trinity will later use to exploit our current difficulties. Are we clear?”

“Crystal.” Garth looked at his proteus. The workmanship was flawless; he’d been wearing it for fifteen minutes and hadn’t once thought to check for differences. Looking at it now, he doubted that Sa Turuin would notice.

“Your provisional status as a citizen can be revoked at any time. Your proteus has been auto-configured to alert local law enforcement of your status so they won’t harass you needlessly. Additionally, you have been granted a miniscule amount of covert protection. It won’t do much but keep you from being arrested for minor –and I mean nothing greater than jaywalking or littering- infractions of the law. Should you fall under enemy fire or other dire straights, rest assured that everything will play out for the better. React as appropriate to the situation, but under no circumstances are you to initiate anything.” The still as yet unnamed agent paused in his warning to catch Garth’s eye. “Are you a smart man, Sa N’Chalez?”

“One of the smartest.”

The agent smiled like a hungry shark, his eyes glittering blackly. “Then it won’t shock you to learn that your new proteus is laced with enough explosive to turn you into a red smear on the ceiling if you do anything we don’t like.”

“I kinda figured that out a while ago, yeah.” Garth shrugged nonchalantly. It’s what he’d do if the situation was reversed.

“Again,” the agent continued, “since you possess an abundance of intelligence, it goes without saying that trying to defuse the bombs will result in premature detonation.”

“What if I wanna take a bath or a shower or something?” Garth asked, putting an edge of nervousness into his voice. They probably thought the idea of wearing a bomb was a freaky thing, and he wanted them to believe they’d finally done something to scare the evil Offworlder. “Is it rigged to blow up if I take it off?”

“You must remain within three feet of the proteus at all times, Sa N’Chalez, otherwise they will go off. During Contest bouts, you will be under direct surveillance, so you will be safe if you pass beyond the perimeter.”

“All right, okay, that sounds good.” Garth smiled uneasily. “Do you have any idea what the OverSecretary is going to ask me to do?”

The agent shrugged as the hovercar began its descent, this time at a safe speed. “It could be anything at all, Sa N’Chalez. Anything at all. Just consider yourself lucky that you weren’t killed outright for being the Trinity spy you are. If I were the sort of person to believe in miracles, I’d say your arrival here and now was just such a thing. Do the OverSecretary the courtesy of proving him correct; if you fail, or do anything to sully his name, the things that will happen to you will become legendary.”

The crowd that had gathered in anticipation of one Garth N’Chalez being forced to take a swan dive from six hundred feet was very disappointed when he climbed out of the hovercar. To make matters worse for the lookie-loos, he wasn’t disfigured, crying, or bleeding from anywhere, seen or unseen. They dispersed with the sullen resentment of denied seeing something fantastically disgusting. As he made his way through the lobby towards the elevators, Garth caught sight of Si Mijomi’s preternaturally hostile shrew face. He winked salaciously at her before hopping onto the elevator.

Her shriek of poorly contained rage sustained him all the way up to his room.