Mind Over Ship (41 page)

“What makes you believe that?”

“I know what her and E-P’s larger goals are, and that they’ll need a first-rate cloning facility, such as yours, to accomplish them. So she offered to buy you out. You, of course, refused.”

“I’ll never sell.”

“Not willingly at least; they know that. Don’t forget who we’re dealing
with. No doubt they are able to model our behavior with a high degree of accuracy. So they needed to soften you up. I don’t know if Andrea colluded with Jaspersen and Singh, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did.”

Nicholas said, “You say she wants our cloning facilities for some larger goals. What goals?”

Eleanor shook her head and smiled. “Sorry, that’ll have to wait for that later discussion I mentioned, which I promise you we’ll have.”

“Promises! Promises!” Zoranna said. “You expect to persuade me with promises?”

“Maybe not, but maybe a prediction will do. I am sorry to say this, but we believe that another, more grievous attack against Applied People will soon take place.”

Zoranna recoiled in dismay, and Nicholas said, “What hit? Tell us what you know.”

Cabinet replied, “We don’t know anything concrete; our predictive abilities fall far short of E-Pluribus’s. But whatever it is, it’ll be big enough to force you to sell. However, it would do Andrea no good to bring Applied People to its knees only to have you sell it to someone else. Therefore, whatever it is, it’ll be something that hurts Applied People in such a way that no one else will want it, and Andrea will seem to be doing you a favor by buying you out.”

Eleanor added, “And when that happens, I’d like you to remember our little talk today. You can decide then whether or not you believe me and want to join us in fighting back.”

“This is monstrous!” Zoranna said. “I can’t believe you came in here to manipulate me like this.”

“This is not manipulation.”

Zoranna seemed to withdraw within herself, and Nicholas said, “How will you fight back?”

Cabinet said, “With a poison pill.”

“Explain.”

“We will send you another datapin. Don’t play it. When you’re ready to act, publicly announce your intention to sell Applied People. Request offers from interested buyers. Then forward our pin to Saul Jaspersen.”

“I thought you said this was an attack against Andrea,” Zoranna said.

“It is, but we can hardly deliver a poison pill to her directly. She has nothing to fear from Jaspersen. Send him the datapin and include a personal message. Strike a conciliatory note. Suggest that you’d entertain a buyout offer from him.”

“Make nice with Jaspersen?” Zoranna rose from her seat. “I’ll do nothing of the sort. I would rather die first.”

Eleanor raised a bushy eyebrow. “I’m sorry, but is there something between the two of you I should know about? Something more than his collusion with Singh?”

Nicholas related Zoranna’s recent brush with death and her lingering suspicions of Jaspersen. He left out the part about his own near meltdown.

“That makes no sense,” Eleanor said. “You know Jaspersen better than any of us, Zoe. You worked for him when he was vice president all those years ago. He gave you your first real job. I remember the falling out you had with him, and I agree that he’s a Luddite, a blowhard, and a jerk. But a murderer? I don’t think so. Besides, if he did want to do you harm, why use his own product line? Why point the finger at himself? No, this sounds like Andrea’s handiwork.

“And it only confirms my hunch that you’re the right person, probably the only person, capable of setting the trap. Send him my datapin and a pleasant note, and at the same time remain noncommittal to any offer Andrea puts forward. Make her think you’re entertaining more interesting offers. If she was responsible for attacking you and framing Jaspersen, she’ll see the datapin going to him and wonder what went wrong. Their E-Pluribus model of you would predict him to be the
last
person in the world you’d cooperate with. The longer you shut her out, the more curious she’ll become.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” Nicholas said. “You say that if we send your datapin to Jaspersen, they’ll see it. How? How does that work? We would naturally use a secure courier.”

“As you should. Have one of your own people hand deliver it. Wait until your courier is present and sees you put the datapin in the pouch before sealing it.”

Zoranna reacted as though insulted. “How
dare
you! How
dare
you come here and accuse my people of corruption! All of my iterants have sworn an oath of client confidentiality. My business depends on it, and we police them constantly. If any of my people leaked client information, let alone
my
information, Nick would know about it at once, and we would deal with the matter most severely.”

“Easy, old friend,” Eleanor said. “No one’s accusing your iterants of anything. But I think you’re underestimating E-P again. Your people
do
participate in E-Pluribus preffing sessions, don’t they? They don’t need to open their mouths there to divulge all sorts of things. Most human knowledge is unconscious anyway, and E-P reads it through the scenarios it constructs.
Your people need only watch a scenario, and E-P can read them through their attraction, repulsion, anticipation, stress levels, and what have you. I, myself, have been using your people to spread disinformation about myself for years.”

Zoranna seemed more lost than ever, and Nicholas made summing-up gestures to bring the meeting to a close. “Thank you for that bit of news. Any other revelations?”

Eleanor shook her head. “No, except to assure you that no matter how all this shakes out, I won’t let Applied People fail.” She glanced at Cabinet, and added, “During my absence, my own company has suffered through poor management, but we’ve got things back on track, and whatever resources you need to weather the storm, just ask.”

NIGHT FELL OUTSIDE the windows, but Zoranna remained in her office alone, watching Uncle Homer suffer on a rug in the corner. The door opened, and Nicholas entered, followed by an arbeitor bearing a light supper, a glass of wine, and a glass of grayish liquid. Zoranna gazed at him silently for a long time, and without the aid of implants, he had only her facial cues to read her by. Their recent visitors had done nothing to lift her mood. Finally, she sighed and removed her feet from the desk. She used a fork to pick at her salad.

Unasked, Nicholas sat in a chair opposite her and said, “You realize, of course, that it might have just been Andrea in disguise. This unspecified disaster looming over us sounds eerily like her earlier prediction.”

“I know.”

“Everyone wants us to roll over and play dead.”

“That might be the best thing to do.”

Even without implants, Nicholas knew she didn’t mean that. In the silence that ensued, he could hear the crunch of carrots between her teeth, but he could not taste them. He heard the panting breath of Uncle Homer in the corner, but chose not to feel it. What a mistake that had been, to create a construct that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish gods.

Zoranna tapped the glass of grayish liquid with her fork and looked at him quizzically.

“Standard, FDA-approved biometry implants,” he said. “Nothing more.”

She did not touch the glass. She turned in her chair and looked at the nighttime city outside the window. Nicholas had known this woman since he was a brand-new belt valet system seventy years ago. He knew
her inside and out, front to back, top to bottom, but she was ever a mystery to him.

The office door opened again, and a second arbeitor rolled in to join the first. It, too, bore a glass of gray liquid. Zoranna looked from it to him.

“Yes,” he said, “my own brew, but improved. You alone turn it on or off. You determine the intensity. It’s all under your direct control.”

Indecision played over her face. After a long moment, she lifted the glass and made a silent toast.

“Show me,” Fred said.

“It was no big thing, Fred. Honest.”

They were in the Boomer Rumor in a rough part of the civieside port. Same sort of dive as the Elbow Room.

“Show me anyway.”

Using his visor, Mando cast a tiny holo on the tabletop between them. It was a scene from Space Gate AL, where Mando had been assigned for the recently reinstated foot patrols. Because it had been recorded by Mando’s visor cap, and not by one of Earth Girl’s stationary cams, Mando, himself, occupied the POV spot and thus was not visible. In the holo, the space gate was jumping with activity as donald dockworkers hustled to offload the newly arrived freighter, ISV
Dragoneer
. Port activity had doubled since the GEP’s announcement that five Oships would be permitted to complete their original mission of ferrying colonists to distant stars. Side deals were being struck between the lucky and unlucky plankholder associations, and much of the increased port activity was ship-to-ship as provisions and cryocapsules were redistributed among them. TECA cited the extra workload and tight launch schedule as the official reason for its decision to reinstate foot patrols. Fred was content to let that pass unchallenged.

In Mando’s holo recording, crates and shells of all sizes were flying in every direction. More than once, a harried-looking donald, a designated babysitter, blocked Mando from bumbling into flight paths. Donalds passing by would sneer or scowl at him, but there were no spit missiles or insults until one donald made a few obscene pelvic thrusts in his direction.

“That’s it?” Fred said.

“I told you it was nothing.”

“It’s not much, but it’s not nothing.”

Fred used his TECA sidekick to quickly research Earth Girl’s own official recordings of that time and place, but he couldn’t find the incident. He found Mando’s cap log in Earth Girl’s archives, but again, not this incident.

“Swipe me your vid,” Fred said.

“But why, Fred? Why are you interested in this thing? The monkeyboys are way more civil now.”

“I’m keeping a document trail is all.”

“You sure it’s not a grudge?”

“A grudge? Me?”

IT WAS HARD to get around Earth Girl’s monopoly on surveillance data. One method he tried was to scoop up whole person/days worth of footage with his TECA sidekick and take it off-line to analyze with his Spectre. The problem was, Earth Girl seemed to be sanitizing any incidents of donald/russ conflict. Also, without a mentar to direct the survey, it was staggeringly difficult to program the Spectre search engine to recognize signs of disrespect. The Spectre contained reliable algorithms for detecting threat and aggression, but mere disrespect came in too many varieties to ever pin down. Fred kept a little visor window open while on patrol so that his Spectre could pass him possible hits for a quick judgment. He found few clear infractions, and these, like Mando’s, tended to be minor. In the end, Fred knew that news of any serious breach of contract would probably come to him as scuttlebutt anyway.

MARY’S FRESH DAILY FUS didn’t seem very fresh. She had no news to share lately, and she didn’t seem particularly curious about his day. Instead, he was treated to more pointless quizzes and a raft of off-the-wall pronouncements. “In a thousand years, Fred, no one will even know or care we ever existed.”

Fred checked the FUS creation date. It was already forty-eight hours old. He shut it off and cast an updated FUS of his own. As his brain was being scanned, he lay on the couch of his stateroom with his eyes closed and concentrated on the question: Why so morbid, Mary?

Fred sent the FUS streaming to Earth and turned his attention to his recent all-consuming obsession—the russ metaverse he had discovered via his Spectre. In addition to the familiar channels that Marcus provided, there were others completely unknown to him back on Earth. There was even a
Book of Russ.
He was thunderstruck the first time he saw it, and his shame rebounded as strong as ever. But this
BOR
was unrelated to his own shortlived forum of the same name and, in fact, preceded it by sixty years. It contained gazillions of entries that spanned every subject imaginable. There was even a “Clone Fatigue” category in which he figured prominently by name. There were thousands of holos and clips of him from the clinic incident, his imprisonment and trial, and the months since his release. These images came both from public cams and private spybots. Some were even recorded from within his and Mary’s apartment, which infuriated but didn’t surprise him. Oddly, and thankfully, there weren’t any clips originating at Trailing Earth, and for the first time he had a reason to be glad about coming up.

The one mystery Fred couldn’t unravel was how something like the
BOR
could be in existence for so long and garner the participation of so many of his brothers and yet remain so secret. Who were these russes? Rather than abuse him, they used his experiences as jumping-off points for serious discussions about clone fatigue, germline personality traits, the Original Flaw, and even the possible existence of russ musts and candies.

Were they the fringe brothers he had always dreamed of meeting? Were they a secret cabal inside the ten-million-strong brotherhood? And if so, could he join them? For the hundredth time he composed a message announcing his presence, and for the hundredth time he deleted it without posting.