The Luna Deception (13 page)

Derek Lorna came into the chapel. He sported a pink tailcoat over a red shirt, a white cummerbund, and baggy tweeds that ended in joke boots with tiger faces on the toes. “OK, everyone!” He clapped his hands. “We’re all here now, so we can get started. Are you psyched for this job? Just say yes and save me the trouble of making a motivational speech.”

A couple of people laughed.

“This is John Mendoza. All of you have expertise in customer relations, which is why you were chosen for this job. But Mendoza is a psephologist. That said, he’s just had an emergency operation, and a couple of days ago, brain surgery I think?” Lorna grinned at Mendoza. “So he’s just here in an advisory role. You can ask him technical questions. Apart from that, comestibles are coming. Any other questions at this point?”

The woman from Harrods said, “Uh, would it be possible to clarify what we’re here for? Sir.”

“Grin.
We’re here to steal an election.”

★

“Just kidding,” Lorna said. “This is what they used to call a get-out-the-vote operation. You’re probably thinking, what’s the point of that? Voting is compulsory. Well, yes, it is. But a lot of people, especially those proud nonconformists who infest our asteroids, don’t like being compelled to do anything. Mendoza, would you explain the NOTA problem to the group?”

Woodenly, Mendoza said, “NOTA: none of the above. It’s a protest vote. If NOTA were a person, he or she would have won every election in the last ten years by a margin of two to twenty percent. In one judicial contest on, I think, Ganymede, some guy changed his name to None Of The Above and won handily. That’s the kind of trick that only works once, though.”

“Thanks,” Lorna said. “That’s it in a nutshell. Now, if everyone would gather around …”

Lorna touched a button, converting one of the ergoform pews into a long desk. He took a sheaf of portable screens out of his briefcase and laid them in a row. There were only six. Lorna clearly meant it about Mendoza just being here in an advisory role.

Lorna turned one of the screens on. “Here are the latest poll numbers from the Inferior Space Election Commission.”

UNVRP DIRECTORSHIP ELECTION

POLL DATA PROVIDED BY INFERIOR SPACE ELECTION COMMISSION

NOTA: 32%

Amanda Patel: 31%

Zazoe Heap: 12%

“And she’s
dead,”
Lorna said. “Those voters are either grief-crazed or mentally defective. Put them in the NOTA column.”

Angelica Lin: 9%

Pyls O. Mani: 8%

Mork Rapp: 7%

Abdullah Hasselblatter: 1%

Wow,
Mendoza thought.
No wonder Lorna is in a good mood.

Dr. Hasselblatter had tumbled from the top to the very bottom of the pack.

That couldn’t be fallout from the violence on Mercury. Something else must have happened while Mendoza was cut off from the internet.

“Who’s Amanda Patel?” said the woman from Harrods customer service.

“The NEO candidate,” Lorna said. “A pediatrician. That’s just the nonconformists venting their spleen. Our job today is to convert all the Patel voters, and as many NOTA voters as possible, into Angelica Lin voters.”

“How?” asked the woman from the Shackleton City Visitor Center.

“Through individual outreach,” Lorna said. “Don’t look at me like that. Yes, it’s a lot of people. Four hundred and thirty thousand, approximately. But it’s perfectly possible to mass-tailor individual outreach campaigns using story-writing MI resources. Isn’t that right, Mendoza?”

There was a rattle at the door of the chapel. A fully loaded breakfast buffet trundled in under its own power. Inhaling the aromas of coffee, toast, scrambled eggs, and sausages, Mendoza realized he was starving.

“Convert half of them, and it’s in the bag,” Lorna said.

“There’s only a few hours left until the polls close,” said one of the construction industry analysts.

“So grab some food and get on it, would be my recommendation.” Lorna’s voice had a steely edge.

Everyone went quiet.

Except Mendoza. Rightly or wrongly, he figured he hadn’t much to lose. He cleared his throat. “It’s not that easy. You have to have a saleable product. Angelica Lin may be easy on the eyes, but her platform is just Charlie Pope lite.’”

Someone laughed, and stifled it.

“Very funny,” Lorna said flintily. “Obviously, we need to add value to our proposition. I was coming to that. You’re authorized to offer this selection of free gifts to each targeted voter, provided they send us a vid grab or screenshot of their vote for Angelica Lin.”

A premium internet avatar

A year’s supply of nutriblocks

A weekend getaway on Luna, including a tour of One Pig Base and a complimentary hamper of pork products

A fifteen-minute live consultation with Frank Hope III to supercharge your personal and financial trajectory (latency time not included)

A home immersion kit worth
S
3,000

“Something there for every income level, as you see,” Lorna said. “And they’ll also be entered into the bonus raffle for …”

A full scholarship to Eton’s exclusive Luna campus for one (1) child between the ages of 6 and 16

“Oh, wow. Can
we
vote, sir?”

“Chuckle!”
Lorna said. “Isn’t
S
10,000 for a single day’s work enough for you?”

“Ha, ha; yes, of course, sir.”

“But isn’t this illegal, sir? I mean, uh …”

“No,” Lorna said. His blue eyes were as cool as winter skies. “Not whatsoever.”

The man who had spoken was one of the construction industry analysts, a fat little Earthborn guy wearing a t-shirt with embedded vid of a toddler’s birthday party. “Thanks for clarifying that, sir,” he mumbled.

Lorna left the room. They grabbed plates of food from the buffet. Conversation was subdued. Mendoza went to sit next to the man with the birthday-party t-shirt. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Emil.” The guy slid a scared glance at Mendoza’s cast.

“Is that your daughter? She’s adorable,” Mendoza said.

“Thanks.”

The others were talking about the mechanics of the job ahead of them. Mendoza heard someone say “Let’s ask the psephology guy.”

This was very obviously the B team. They’d never get it done without his help.

He buttered a bran muffin. “I’m just here in an advisory role,” he told Emil. “But if I’m going to be any real help to you guys, I’ll need a screen.” He gestured at the fold-up sticking out of Emil’s back pocket. “Mind if I borrow yours?”

★

As soon as Mendoza got himself logged on under Emil’s name, he ran a search. “ALL DATABASES: DR. ABDULLAH HASSELBLATTER.”

The first result—and the second, and the third, and the three hundredth result—was a viral vid of Dr. Hasselblatter having sex with a maidbot.

“Oh boy,” Mendoza murmured. He ate the other half of his muffin and skimmed the commentary. The consensus was that the vid was real, not a fake.

Links led to another vid. This one was a press conference where Dr. Hasselblatter had tried to explain away the first vid. It ended with a scuffle between Dr. Hasselblatter’s burka-clad wife and the UN peacekeepers providing security at the event.

Helpful anti-censorship activists explained that the vid had originally ended with NSFW footage of Mrs. Hasselblatter’s burka being torn off. She had turned out not to be a Muslim at all—nor even human. ‘She’ had been a sex-bot.

“Yuck,” Mendoza muttered, remembering the hints he’d picked up that there was something off about Dr. Hasselblatter’s personal life.

I don’t want to go there,
Lorna had said, but after their sabotage campaign backfired, he must have decided he had no choice.

It had worked, anyway. The leaked vid had torpedoed Dr, Hasselblatter’s bid for the UNVRP directorship. The press conference had ended his career.

Mendoza went back over the press conference vid, frame by frame. In one crowd shot, he found what he was looking for: a glimpse of Elfrida. She was standing on a desk, gnawing her knuckles as she watched her boss’s career implode. It must have been a horrible shock for her. Mendoza knew she’d respected Dr. Hasselblatter, as much as she groused about his ambition.

So, sixteen hours ago she’d been alive and well.

But that had been
before
the riots.

Logged in as Emil, Mendoza did not dare search for Elfrida’s name. Instead, he compared the latest news reports on the riots. The death toll was still rising, but names had begun to be put to the dead, and Elfrida’s was not among them.

She’s alive.

She
has
to be alive.

But the situation on Mercury was still in flux. Amateur vid feeds showed Star Force Marines stalking the halls of UNVRP HQ, children weeping as their parents were dragged away. That was the kind of thing that short-circuited Elfrida’s brain, as Mendoza knew all too well. She’d stop at nothing to help the survivors, even if it put her in danger.

Would the situation calm down if Angelica Lin won the election? If Derek Lorna got what he wanted?

Mendoza knuckled his eyes. The travel agent interrupted his thoughts with a cough. “Um, we were just wondering about these MI story-writing resources we’ve been given. If you could show us how they work?”

Mendoza forced a smile. He had no choice. This was the only thing he could do that might help Elfrida. “Sure. I’ll walk you through it.”

★

Nine hours later, the torrent of data flowing across their screens dwindled to a trickle and stopped. Mendoza looked at the other members of the team. “We did it.”

They exchanged weary grins. They had successfully bribed 143,012 people to cast their votes for Angelica Lin.

“It’s not over yet,” said Emil. “There’s two hours to go before voting closes.”

“It’s mathematically over,” Mendoza said. “Check your news feeds. They’re already reporting Lin’s victory.”

Derek Lorna had got what he wanted … at the cost of committing a crime that would put them all in jail for the rest of their lives, if they got caught. Not to mention the cost of all those bribes. It must have run into the tens of millions.

Well, that wasn’t Mendoza’s problem.

They wandered around the chapel, stretched their stiff muscles, and snacked on the remains of the lunch buffet that had replaced the breakfast buffet. Outside the windows, spacecraft continued to land and take off. It was getting on for 22:00, Luna time, but Mendoza did not feel remotely tired. His back hurt a bit. He crunched another of the painkillers the medibot had given him after his operation.

While the others discussed what they were going to do with the money, Mendoza peeked at Emil’s screen again.

He’d been poking around in the spaceport’s data management utilities. He had access, because the team had needed to use the spaceport’s computing resources to hide the origin of all those individually tailored polls. He had searched the launch schedule for ships likely to be the one carrying Fr. Lynch. He’d identified a handful of possibles. And he’d moved their launch slots back.

22:06.

The
Gold Digger,
a Juggernaut bound for Ceres, blasted off.

Hope that wasn’t it.

He did not know if he would get a chance to contact any of the ships. But maybe, now that Derek Lorna had got what he wanted, he’d let Mendoza go.

The door of the chapel opened. Lorna himself entered with a light step. “Congratulations! You did it, guys! You’ve earned a place in history. Not the official version, of course.”

Puzzled smiles greeted this announcement.

“Five years from now, or maybe ten years, humanity will thank you. Unfortunately, you won’t be around to see it. Because the future of humanity does not belong to plebs like you. It belongs to highly advanced phavatars.” Lorna grinned. “Like me.”

The top of his head hinged back. A stubby little gun threw a targeting laser across the chapel. The beam fastened on Seanette, the woman from Harrods customer service. It brightened to a linear lightning bolt. Seanette went rigid and collapsed, her limbs jittering on the floor.

After a second of stunned disbelief, everyone screamed and scattered to the ends of the chapel. Mendoza dived under the pews. He recalled how he’d evaded Lorna’s hijacked bot in the clinic at Farm Eighty-One. His chances were poorer now. He’d been buzzing on morale juice at that time. Also, he hadn’t been in a minimal-flexion cast following surgery.

Also, Dr. Miller’s assistant hadn’t had an electrolaser in its head.

He crawled past Emil’s body. Emil’s hair was burning, while the children on his t-shirt silently sang Happy Birthday once again.

Ganfeng from the Shackleton City Visitor Center leapt over Mendoza, kicking him in the cast. It hurt so much Mendoza almost blacked out. When his vision cleared, he saw Ganfeng lying face-down. Electrolaser weapons delivered a precisely calibrated current via an ionized plasma beam. Basically, they electrocuted you.

“Mendoza.”

He sat up. Stared at Lorna, who was a couple of meters away, standing in front of the little waterfall at the end of the chapel.

But of course, it wasn’t Lorna. It was a phavatar, a robotic telepresence platform. The type known as a “selfie”—a phavatar that had been customized to resemble its owner in every detail.

Except for the gun sticking out of the top of its head.

“Saved you for last,” the phavatar said. “I thought you’d like to know a bit more about the future you won’t, unfortunately, see.”

“Don’t you know what happens to bad guys who stop to gloat before killing their victims?”

“Oh, come on. I’m not a bad guy. I’m just well-informed. If paying attention to what’s going on makes you a bad guy …” The phavatar shrugged. “Stick horns on me and call me Lucifer, I guess. But someone’s got to do this, and I volunteered to be the one who breaks the eggs.”

Mendoza would have laughed, if he hadn’t been so terrified. “Was any of it true? The stuff you told me about fighting back against the PLAN?”

“Absolutely. Every last word. You could have been part of it, too, if you hadn’t screwed up.”

Mendoza snuck a glance around the room. Bodies lay motionless. He smelled burning fabric and hair. Why wasn’t anyone coming to help? Answer: Lorna had made sure they wouldn’t. He probably had friends in the Spaceport Authority. People who thought the same way he did.