Glow, p.6
Glow, page 6
Danger! Local hostility index approaching critical!
His memory understood that he was panicking, that he should breathe, slow down, calm the anger around him – but he couldn’t.
Targeting options overlaid the translations, highlighting soft spots on heads, throats, and joints. A grinning man thrust something at his face.
Sandwich: carbohydrate-based sustenance for human consumption.
Jett thrust out a hand and the man reeled backward tumbling a half-dozen others into a heap with him.
“You! Come here!” yelled a man in a military-style uniform, waving a pistol in the air.
Jett ran. His body took on the task of evasive maneuvers, jolting him side-to-side, changing pace, pulling his head down below the level of the crowd. He churned through people and stalls leaving a wake of disaster behind.
Every eye on the bridge suddenly found him.
“Stop! Or I’ll shoot!”
His legs lengthened, clothing fibers unwound and coiled around them like springs. He vaulted the last fifty meters of bridge in a single bound over gasping bystanders, landing squarely on the East Firmament riverbank. He hit the ground, rolled and ran. Humans moved in slow motion, vanishing behind along with their noises, smells and inscrutable facial expressions.
He slowed from a run back to a brisk walk, zigzagging through back-alleys and side-streets, shrinking, slowing, morphing from invading alien monster back to shambling beach dweller, shifting colors to blend into the surroundings.
East Firmament was a cleaner district, with maintained houses, factories and many bridges over the elaborate Interstice canal system that divided Coriolis City into districts and zones.
Mission to blend-in: Failed. What happened? Where were those human memories Gale told him would come when he needed them?
He crossed into Welkin, Coriolis’s downtown district. More people. No escape from them here. Welkin was a dense circle of towers and parks surrounding a central lake of fusion glass. A permanent scar on the city, a gift from the Nova-Insanity.
He stuck to the side streets, face hidden as if in shame at his failure. The open space of the glass lake beckoned. A flat circle of translucent crystal over a thousand meters in diameter, ringed by singed and rebuilt buildings, towers that leaned alarmingly inward, and the sparse attempts at new construction. The glass novascape was now a park. Trenches cut into the crystalline surface and were filled with earth; plants and trees formed pleasing green spaces where people walked and sat.
Monuments and sculptures lined the spider’s web of cycle paths and walkways. The whole area resembled a giant ice-sculpture, one that would never melt.
Jett found a bench and sat, feigning normality. Observe and learn, know the enemy. People whisked past on bikes and on foot. Some talked to themselves, some talked to anyone or anything around. Others shouted randomly or sang songs. There were jugglers, storytellers, preachers, recruiters, conmen, peddlers and healers, each vying for attention from the passing thousands.
Jett sat, watching, letting them flow past like cosmic rays around a magnetic bubble. His Inner-I gathered information on their clothes, eyes, smiles and grimaces, hairstyles, gaits and the quirks and tics of movement that made every one of them so different.
“You ain’t from around here.” A woman with just a single, visible tooth planted herself on the bench next to him. Her head was a grotesque orb, like some vegetable-based parody of human, but with no nose or ears. She sucked in air through two holes in the front of her face and eyed him through a single, oversized eyeball. Her other eye was glass that sparkled like a miniature novascape. She hid her hands inside wool mittens that radiated no heat signatures.
Leper. The tag stuck to her in his gaze. Street jargon for a user of the longevity drug Lepa.
He stared, mind a blank as his social modeling routines pushed an appropriate response onto his vision. He read the words, but no sounds came from his mouth. He couldn’t recall ever using his actual voice before. All communications in space were through Inner-I or military gestures. He tried again, powering the empty cavity inside his chest, sucking in air and forcing it back out across unused vocal cords.
The woman raised her functional eyebrow as gurgling noises emerged from Jett’s mouth. He spawned a comparison algorithm that matched his sound emissions to the intended vocalization. He gurgled again… closer… not quite. The woman’s eyebrow rose higher.
“What makes you say that?” The words finally emerged intact.
She shrugged, understanding, and her eyebrow dropped back to normal orientation. Jett felt a surge of elation. His first successful voidian-human communication outside of a simulator.
“You look different and you speak… funny,” she said, suddenly distracted by traffic noise. Her hidden thoughts played out across her face in twitches and momentary expressions. Distraction over, she looked him up and down. “There’s something weird about you.” She stood up shaking her head and wandered around behind him. Jett twitched with combat readiness as her hands touched his shoulders. He struggled to replicate the soft, flexible texture of cloth over human flesh from the near-rigid fibers of his fullerene flesh.
She leaned in close to his ear. “You forgot to breathe, honey.” With a cackle she headed off across the park, passing from flowerbed to flowerbed like a child.
Jett slumped back from combat readiness. He should have realized his lack of chest movement wouldn’t go unnoticed. Another mistake.
An algorithm set his chest expanding and contracting in simulated respiration. The old woman looked back, “What are you?” she yelled, putting her hands above her head in an X-symbol.
The Cross of Convolution, The Multiplier. Symbol of prophesized man-machine hybridization used in several disparate Future-Lord religions across the post Nova-Insanity Americas and Pacific Islands.
Combat training had taught Jett the utility of myths and legends. The scars on his face dulled and vanished, leaving just one that wriggled and moved across his cheek and changed into a diagonal cross.
“I’m what comes next,” he said to her retreating back as she stepped into the crowd and was gone. Blend-in and learn. He mentally thanked the old lady for the lesson and followed her out of the park to look for somewhere to live.
“When was the last time you left your room, Tomas?” Ellayna asked.
“Why would I leave my room?”
“When was the last time you actually met a real, live person?”
Long silence, mumbles and breaths. “Ellayna, as I’ve grown older, I’ve concluded that human contact is vastly overrated. Better to remain at a distance, safely behind the impenetrable technological barriers that we so diligently erected all those years ago.” He stopped, seemed to think for a second and then continued, his voice now containing an unmistakable modulation of hope. “Are you lonely, Ellayna?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t suffer from it as well.” She moved to stand in front of her mirror. Naked, she looked disheveled, her skin a haunted, sun-deprived gray with dark rings around her eyes. The Simmorta, the miraculous nanotech devices inside her body, struggled to keep her alive in this environment of micro-gravity and dangerous radiation. She hated those machines, but without them no one lasted more than a handful of months in orbit.
“I’m happy to meet in a VR room, Ellayna.” His voice trembled, or was it just the cosmic rays messing with the comms network? “We could play some immersive games, catch up on old times. It’s just like reality but–” He seemed to remember Ellayna’s recent run-in with the VR bugs “–sorry. I know you like the gravity gym. I’d go exercise with you, but I’ve set my Simmorta to dormant and can barely walk at the moment.”
“I didn’t think you were one for fads, Tomas.”
“Give the longevity technology a rest and let the body age naturally for a while. Then, when I switch it back on, I get a boost and I should get much healthier. Lots of our fellow directors are trying it.”
She called up her full-immersion avatar, superimposing it on her room. She dialed back the age-slider so that a younger, tauter Ellayna stood before her. Twenty-year-old body, full head of hair, piercing, learned eyes. She toyed with the hair style, clothing, skirt length… Perhaps twenty was too young, maybe thirty. She nudged the aging slider forward a little. She twirled the avatar around: good. No… perfect!
“I have a favor to ask, Tomas. I’m heading into an immersive VR meeting, private affair, bit nervous. Can I send you a link to my life-signs monitor? I don’t trust the auto-monitor, so if you catch anything dangerous then call the medics and security.”
She felt his sadness, knew that he assumed she was meeting another, certainly younger, man. “Of course,” he said, softly. “Anything for you, Ellayna.”
“Thank you.” She stared at Tomas’s image in the corner of her vision: rounded shoulders, chin on his chest. “Think of this as practice. When I’m used to meeting in VR again, perhaps we can do something fun, together?” She saw him perk up, smile and nod. She dismissed his image, severed their connection and flicked open Trabian’s message containing the address of his virtual construction. “Let’s see what games young Trabian has in mind…”
She settled back onto the bed, wrapping low-g support webbing around her arms and legs, and nodded toward her slowly rotating avatar, poised for action. “Go get him, girl.” She hit the immersion button in her visual field and her apartment faded, running like dripping paint, before solidifying into something new.
Gravity. Full immersion meant gravity. That alone was reason enough to use it.
She stood in a doorway looking across a large, comfortable room with a huge viewing screen and a curved red couch that could seat a dozen.
“That wasn’t so bad,” she gasped, finally remembering to breathe.
“Excuse me?” said the youthful figure sprawled across the couch, eyebrow raised.
“Trabian!” she said, acting surprised, as if expecting somebody else.
“Are you okay, Ellayna?” He rolled off the couch and offered a supporting hand.
“It’s nothing, just a touch of VR-phobia.” She dismissed his aid and stood swishing her skirt, enjoying the feeling of being inside her virtual body: full-immersion. So real. She was light, fresh, young and alive… and living in a complete dream world.
Trabian wore a fresh-faced avatar, youthful but older than she remembered, but then she hadn’t seen him for real in years. He dressed in sharp, angular clothing, a naïve attempt to look wise and important in front of his elder. “You look so–”
“Young?” she said, hopefully. He nodded, seemingly lost for words. “I dressed up a little, don’t get out that much these days.”
She looked away, embarrassed at his staring, while composing herself and resetting her professional demeanor. “Why did you ask me here?”
“If we couldn’t meet in VR, then I’d never get to see you at all.” He feigned a sad smile.
She turned her attention back to the surrounding room, really an ornate TV lounge. “Is this a real room?”
“It’s my newsroom back on Cloud8.”
“Are you real?” She suddenly felt alarmed by that idea, an invasion of privacy, her dumping herself into his room and seeing his real person.
“Maybe, you’ll have to touch me to find out.”
She ignored his cumbersome tease. “What are we watching?” She eased down onto the couch next to him, keeping a comfortable distance.
His lusty grin turned down, suddenly serious. “I come here to relax and catch up on news.” He motioned to the big screen and it became a deep holographic view of various news feeds coming up from Earth. “I was watching the Breakout Alliance invading yet another country under the guise of being the democratically elected liberators of downtrodden people.”
“So skeptical, Trabian. The Alliance at least pretends to be democratic before invading.”
One of the feeds closed in on the Alliance craft, a super-hopper class embassy ship, a colossal, crudely pyramid-shaped structure surrounded by a halo of smaller ships and a fine mist of tiny countermeasure craft. It rose from its sea launch platform, turned in midair, ignited a cluster of massive booster rockets and headed up to the stratosphere. “Look at that thing,” Trabian said, voice filled with awe. “It’s massive.”
She nodded. Her own awe tempered by the feeling she was witnessing the instrument of her own destruction. “Quite a machine. Possibly one of the most advanced technologies to appear since the Nova-Insanity.”
“Are we afraid of it, Ellayna?”
“We’d blow it out of the sky if it ever came into low orbit.” The confidence in her voice was an attempt to mask the sinking dread she felt inside. The footage switched to the craft landing. It hovered over a crushed and ruined city as if seeking the right spot while giving its halo of fighting machines time to vanquish any opposition. It slowly descended into an open park. The tag identified the city as Old Bucharest, Neutral Europe. The machine lit with incoming fire as the local dictatorship unleashed what was left of its defensive forces.
“Why there?” Trabian asked.
“Black Sea access. Maybe some resources the Alliance needs. Taunau calls it ‘practice’.”
“For us?”
“They started with simple island nations, then graduated to tinpot dictatorships in Africa and Europe. Next will be something bigger, testing their defenses and their technology and that formidable offensive capability they’ve developed.”
“And then us.” Trabian slumped back in the couch. For a moment she felt sorry for him. So young, so alone, just waiting for the end. Like them all really. “What are we doing, Ellayna? How can we stop that?”
“We’re safe as long as they can’t manufacture Simmorta. It’s that simple. They need it. We make it. If they try and take it, then we have the Armageddon option: blow it all up and everyone loses.” The explanation sounded stupid, here, now, with such young ears listening. She’d heard it so many times though, justifying so many crimes.
“Why not just let the world have it? Everyone becomes effectively immortal and our expansion into space can resume just like before the Insanity.”
Tomas, of course, would agree. Give it away, free ourselves. Free the world, just like Del and all the rebels expected to do by defecting. They all died, except Del. Empowered by the victory, the Protectionist faction remained strong and determined to this day. What belonged to the GFC should remain within the GFC. Giving it away would hand the baton of power to somebody else. An unknown, untested, and untrusted regime.
She flashed Trabian a sour look. “Remind me, why am I here?”
His head dropped and his masculine bravado faded back to that of a shy young man. “I found something interesting regarding the meteor event.”
“Defector event,” she corrected him, catching his eyes flicking upward and scanning her body. He must be wondering what she really looked like. He knew her age. Did he care? People raised to use VR often didn’t worry how reality appeared. But then again, was this really him? She could reach out and touch him. If he was real then her avatar would just break around him, no sensation for either of their bodies. But if he was virtual, like her, then they could touch and feel sensation, that tingle of passion, that–
He snapped his eyes away and continued talking. “I checked through data feeds from some remote sensor outposts on our mothballed orbitals and found this.” He pulled a viewing screen out of thin air. As his fingers fumbled to enlarge the video display, she noticed him shuffle closer on the couch, just barely encroaching on her bubble of personal space. He must be virtual if he’s trying to touch me.
The image showed a star-like twinkle of orange. “Color enhanced,” Trabian said, eyes distant on his workspace. “It’s a flash of laser backscatter. The reason no comms showed coming from Cloud8 or Cloud9 was that someone used a laser, very precise, and unless our monitors were at very specific angles, we couldn’t have detected which direction it came from.”
“And how does this help us?” She leaned into him a little, gave the boy some encouragement.
The screen changed to a mass of ray diagrams. “AI reconstruction algorithms on the four backscatters I detected.”
“Four?”
“The first was a very short burst, microseconds, possibly an activation signal for the onboard voice beacon we heard. The others were longer, possibly software patches or if it was a person onboard, an encrypted message. Either way, they all trace back to a point somewhere around here–” The main viewing screen flashed and became a closeup of TwoLunar.
Ellayna felt her heart leap, wondered if Tomas was monitoring her vitals. What did he make of that? Seeing the slowly tumbling ruin tore open memories of death, destruction and grief. At the outbreak of the Nova-Insanity, someone had smuggled a nova device onboard the giant, incomplete orbital, blowing the side out and killing thousands. The attached space-elevator cable had broken from its anchor point on Transit Mountain. She remembered it glistening and fraying like silken threads as it wrapped endlessly around the crippled orbital. A celestial spider slowly enveloping its gigantic catch. “Ursurper Gale?”
Trabian jumped to his feet. “Why is that – thing – Gale, allowed to… I would say live, but exist seems more appropriate?”
“When Gale broke free during the Great Defection, we chased him; we tried to kill him for years. But he’s smart and resourceful, designed to survive out there. In the end, we let him go. But if he’s truly meddling with GFC affairs then we need him stopped.”
Trabian dropped back onto the couch, a few inches closer, his hand very close to Ellayna’s knee. “This is good information?” He stared at his hand as if willing it to make the jump on its own.
“Very good, Trabian. You should present it to the security committee immediately.” She stared at his twitching fingers, wondering if he’d dare, and what she’d do if he did. She reached out and patted the back of his hand. The shudder of human contact was very real which meant that Trabian was just an avatar, like she was. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention first.” She released his hand and stood, noting the flash of disappointment that crossed his face.
