The Process Server

  ***

  Just two days earlier, I’d been on the NTC, discussing Fesker’s loan with my mentor and stepfather, Harrison Peel.

  Peel is an old spacer, a lieutenant in Munch’s organization and about 220, already at that latter stage of life, when the influential find themselves increasingly replacing necrotic tissue with synthetics, trying to prolong the game for one more century.

  In Harrison’s case, he’d already replaced both arms with nifty bionic models. Not that he had more choice than anyone else his age; the ‘cure’ for tissue death was nearly two centuries old now, but still wasn’t perfect.

  And treatment was still limited to upper and middle management, which is how the Big Six got away with population control on Earth, and the 40-year age limit.

  For reasons perhaps only he’ll ever know, Harrison picked me off an NTC street at age nine, abandoned by my original adoptive parent when he realized I couldn’t lift enough weight to work in his Plexinum production factory.

  Harrison had never been the warmest guy – yet another reason our relationship baffled others – and he wasn’t just going to bail me out of the loan.

  But he was good to talk to about my problems, and his advice was usually bang on.

  “You’d never learn anything if I kept solving this crap for you,” he’d told me, as we sat across the dining table in his suite, sharing a coffee, me in my grubby jacket and him in an olive business suit.

  His head was bald. Harrison’s arms were a practical necessity, but he certainly wasn’t vain: his hair had disappeared around age 140 and unlike so many these days he’d avoided getting grafts.

  “Pure vanity,” he’d note. “The new scalp tissue dies, they gotta go back in every year or they look like freaks.”

  Of course, these days, that was also pretty relative. He’d initially had synth skin over the arms, but like many people had given up on its sleeve-like lack of consistency and its droopy appearance after a while.

  So now, he just left his bionics out in the open, their tiny gears and servos whirring efficiently every time he moved.

  “Yeah, I know pops, but damn, Fesker is sticking it to me on the interest. What’s the maximum legal rate here right now? 49% per month? He must have me at 48.9. I have to get this thing settled or he’ll have me locked into service for years.”

  I sighed and looked out the window, and at Earth, way off in distant space.

  You had to hand it to the terra formers: they’d done a hell of a job with the NTC. Harris lived in the South Form tropical zone, a palm-trees-and-beaches continent mostly designed for well-heeled retirees. The less wealthy middle-managers got block apartments on East Form.

  I watched a parrot glide lazily from a perch on one side of his building’s back yard to the other, even as off in the distance, small rectangular spacecraft and shuttles made their way into the capital, their bulk standing stark against the shadow-soaked clouds and the crimson hues of an island sunset.

  Harris looked utterly unsympathetic. “Why would you borrow 10,000 credits from a guy like Fesker anyway? What were you thinking?’

  I didn’t have an option, I explained, never raising the obvious question: you’ve worked for him for 112 years. What’s your excuse? “If I wanna work, I need to keep my ship running. That takes money.”

  He tilted his head backwards in a moment of strained anguish. “For creds’ sake, you could buy a new ship for 150,000. You can’t pour money into keeping that thing going forever, you know. You need to get your financial priorities straight, kid.”

  “It’s a classic. One day it’ll be a collector’s item.”

  He scoffed at that. “Yeah, if by collector you mean junk salvage. It’s a rusty hunk of space debris and you know it. I’m surprised the damn thing hasn’t flat-out killed you yet.”

  We were silent for a moment, partly because we both knew he was right, and partly because we knew the ship was about a bigger moral issue, and Harrison hated talking about bigger moral issues.

  He especially hated the ones we’d gone over time and again, lessons handed down to me by his late wife, Edie, who’d died of Niven’s Disease two decades earlier.

  It occasionally forced him to admit to having his own value system. And it forced him to remember Edie, who he loved more dearly than… well, anything or anyone, really.

  He pondered the whole thing silently for a moment, the creases wearing deeply into his forehead. But Harrison was the one who’d taught me it wasn’t wise to dwell. He nodded toward me again, slightly puzzled. “So what do they want with this Archivist?”

  “They,” meant the Big Six, which kind of went without saying. Who else had 10,000 creds for a single document delivery?

  I shrugged. “Don’t know yet. Haven’t even read the summons, just glanced at it, and at the enormous sum for the deliverer. Some copyright thing.”

  That also sort of went without saying, given that the Archivists made their living uncovering new tech and copyrighting it, then protecting that copyright until final registration, up to three earth weeks later.

  The speed of new tech development, however, meant that hired guns willing to take an Archivist down could make a quick buck, and the copyright would go unregistered by anyone except their client.

  Some did it the legal way, by getting restraining orders or issuing countersuits, red-tape that could slow everything down. Others just cut to the chase, tracked down the Archivist and blew his head off – although it had been a while since one had been sloppy enough to be taken out.

  “No shit. But why?” Harris was naturally curious whenever business got into the five-digit range.

  Another shrug. “I didn’t look. It was an auto teller job, so it’ll be a numbered subsidiary anyway.”

  He looked unimpressed and wagged a stern articulated metal finger at me. “What am I always telling you, Bob? You need to pay attention to the details.”

  I tried to compensate, adding, “There was something in there about an engine, so I’m guessing Hui-Matsumori.”

  The last remnant of the once-great nations of China and Japan, Hui-Matsumori Corporation was proof that there was value in putting aside old enmities even in a world governed corporately.

  The two nations had done it just in time to become obsolete themselves, but had diplomatically paved the way for the first trans-national mega merger, the first occasion when a corporation’s power, wealth and influence exceeded that of every other nation-state on the planet combined.

  Hui-Matsumori had also built my ship, a ‘072 Star Master, its second or third foray into interstellar travel.

  Yeah, you heard that right, a Star Master.

  Sweet creds, you tell people you fly a 200-year old ship that predates Jofari navigation and they look at you like … well, like Harrison had looked at me when I’d first told him about the loan.

  “Buy a new ship,” he’d said. “Jeez, you’re embarrassing me, you know that? Who wants to be seen in that thing?”

  “Can’t. The ‘072 is the last engine that can’t be adapted to a Jofari Psychic Core,” I’d explained. “If I don’t need one to get around, I’m not using one. If I get an adaptable engine, eventually clients will start making time demands, forcing my hand.”

  Harrison looked stern. “You got to change with the times and the technology, kid. I know you think there’s some unseen karma or morality out there paying attention to your stubbornness, but it just ain’t so.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  He shook his head gently. “The war was over a century ago and guess what? They lost. Offering up their own to be part of Hui-Matsumori’s biotech was the Jofari’s choice, not ours.”

  The history holos left out the part in which Earth parked its largest galactic battle cruiser just above the Jofari atmosphere and threatened to reduce entire mountain ranges to little more than rubble.

  But anyone who wasn’t logged onto the MultiNet constantly had access to real history, from the perspective of oth
er planets that had stayed neutral, particularly those in K’Laar System.

  So I knew the reality, and so did Harrison: as a young staff member of the fledgling company, he’d been on board one of Earth’s ships, a navigation officer who had yet to figure out how much happier he felt on the wrong side of the authorities.

  Hui-Matsumori’s need to control Jofar space was rooted in pure corporate realism: the Jofari’s limited psychic abilities made them unparalleled navigational controllers, which was essential when using Quantum Dimensional Travel.

  But they were slaves, not shipmates, bonded for a lifetime to a biomechanical engine core, a Quantum Jump Drive, blinders on, limiting their vision to nothing other than locations in their minds’ eyes. Given that they looked like a strange mixture of human and vampire bat – right up to and including non-functioning bat-like wings – most people just couldn’t give a damn. They thought of the Jofari as a demon race that attacked them and was rightfully enslaved for it.

  That was something I’d always hated, the idea of their choice being taken away. People could think you were a piece of shit in this universe – and I’m a Smith, so don’t I know that they do – as long as they didn’t try to mess with your freedom.

  But to Harrison, freedom didn’t always equate to his priority which, like most people these days, was his sense of security.

  It may have explained his long and strange working relationship with Fesker Munch, as nasty a boss as any man could ever have, but as tough as they came.

  So he didn’t really get it.

  “Instead you’re … what, jumping through Short Space rather than a direct route? That’s nuts. You know how fucking dangerous that is. There’s a reason no one’s done it regularly for two centuries.”

  Yeah. But I also knew what it felt like to be second class. “I don’t want to change with the times, pops,” I’d said. “Progress isn’t always…”

  He’d cut me off right there. “Ah! Ah, ah, ah… you just watch what you say there, Bob.”

  He pointed around the Spartan, modern room. “This is my house, but NTC is still Big Six terrain, and that kind of incitement could get you into a whole lot of trouble you don’t need.”

  It was true. If I’d have finished the sentence, any one of the transmitters in his house would have picked up the phraseology of the sentiment, compared it with a database of offending terms and relayed it to Cardale Group’s education department, given that it had corporate control of South Form.

  Now, a month later, I needed 12,500 creds and the bill was climbing. So I’d taken the job to find the Archivist and serve him as soon as I’d seen the contract’s bottom line.

  “You want a coffee?” he asked. Harrison got up and uncharacteristically walked over to his feed nook instead of just telescoping one of his absurdly practical new arms over to grab the pot. Perhaps he had already tired of that stunt, I thought, worrying about him.

  Retirement wasn’t sitting well with him, and he looked more fatigued by it all every time I came around.

  He poured me a cup.

  “Real?”

  He gave me his best “don’t be a wise-ass” look.

  “Sure, and my old arms will grow back. No, of course it’s not real. But it’s that good shit, the synth from Barrowman Station.”

  I had to admit, Barrowman’s synthetics were the closest to real Earth coffee anyone up here had had in years. Real Earth coffee was almost completely gone now, grown in small batches and only available to upper management.

  “Sure.”

  He handed me a mug and sat back down.

  “You know, you don’t have to keep doing this to yourself, Bob. Give up the hunk of crap ship and just come and live here off of me, like family. You know I’ve got the creds. Kick back, watch the holos, smoke a little of the NTC green.”

  “Nah, not my style.”

  “Style? Style schmyle. It’s a nice place.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  Even in a criminal syndicate like Fesker Munch’s gang, people respected an individual who could live off family in upper or middle management.

  After all, nothing was more successful than an entrepreneur, someone who could make something from nothing, particularly when it came as easily as taking it from a family member.

  Everyone who was anyone had done it at some point or another, given that almost everyone in upper management inherited great wealth and privilege, as corporate legacies.

  Having me sponging off of him would have added to Harrison’s social status, even though I’m a Smith. Social creds didn’t mean much offline, but people still paid attention if they knew you could provide a good time online.

  If you had the wealth to bankroll an entrepreneur – especially one who did nothing productive, online or off – it really meant you were somebody.

  And Harrison had the wealth. You don’t spend 182 years helping hijack intergalactic freight, blackmailing upper management and knocking over connected folk – like the Archivist of G’Farg, for instance – without making some creds along the way.

  His house showed it, an opulent 370-square-feet in which he had so much room, he didn’t even had to fold the bed into its wall nook. And a kitchen! A real life, honest-to-goodness kitchen.

  Of course, it was all synthed food, but it looked fantastic.

  He even had a privacy cubicle for his toilet. Sweet Sunlight, his house was almost as nice as my ship! True, he stayed home more than most of us, but geez – a house almost as nice as a ship.

  And Harrison’s had nothing on the split-level condominium downtown owned by Fesker Munch, which was just about exactly twice the size.

  Fesker had upper management money, even if he’d never get there legitimately, and they accorded him begrudging respect.

  He hadn’t been born in the right family or joined the right department while young, of course, so he could never actually be an upper.

  But Fesker didn’t mind.

  He figured he was better than them anyway. So he’d bought a glass-walled self-tinting dual level in a high rise populated by some of the cream of middle management and even a few uppers, too, young guys who had yet to learn to isolate themselves socially from others.

  It towered over the North Form tourism zone, mirroring the hover traffic that flew by, a monolithic nod to the NTC’s growing power.

  Harrison’s place was a hell of a lot more humble, just a townhouse. But compared to anything I could afford, it was a palace.

  My pilot Jayde and I basically lived on the ship, anyhow.

  I could have sponged off Harrison. It just wasn’t my style. “Never fear, pops. I’ll close off this delivery, maybe one more after that, and the old girl will be back in tip-top shape in no time.”

  “How are you going to find him?” He poured himself another cup.

  “Don’t know. But Earth’s only got so many options for off-worlders who want to log on directly. He’ll be in a hotel or hostel. And if he’s someone’s guest, it’ll be someone famously powerful; anyone else would see harboring an archivist as seriously hazardous to their health.”

  Harrison gestured vaguely out the window, towards the sky. “You still using that same pilot, the kid?”

  “Come on, pops. Give her a break, all right?”

  He rolled his eyes a bit. “You know what I meant. Hey, I wouldn’t say it if she were here, would I? But it’s reality: she may be 250 on the inside, but on the outside she’s 14.”

  It was a valid point, but it pissed me off when anyone brought it up. Jayde Chen was an RDH, a Reclaimed Deceased Human, and there weren’t that many left. For about 40 years, midway through the 21st Century, it became fashionable to revive humans who’d been cryogenically stored, using nascent anti-necrosis technology to repair their ills.

  But an ethical debate had emerged among middle management – a rare thing indeed, and if you asked upper management, more than likely due to too many of them spending too much time with regular Earthers on the M
ultiNet.

  Middle-management had grown restless, wanting to know if it was unfair to demand indentured servitude in exchange for reclamation. The debate was evenly split between those who abhorred the idea, and those who noted that, without them, these people wouldn’t even have a life to debate.

  In the end, it reminded a few too many people of slavery – not credit or wage slavery, which were both perfectly acceptable, of course. Slavery slavery.

  And so the RDHs had been given their unconditional ownership release … and a social status roughly equivalent to Smiths and Does, or maybe slightly north of us.

  That way, they still did the grunt work, but no one had to feel guilty about it. Most had died off by now, because their tissue had rejected the anti-necrotic agent, as it did with every person eventually.

  Jayde’s parents had been wealthy, and had cryogenically frozen their daughter due to her death from cancer back in 2016.

  When she awoke, she found her new owner – a vice trafficker from K’Laar System – had had the cancer removed and cured, and had ensured her cell structure had been altered.

  Usually, that wasn’t safe until the recipient was in their 40s and the outer cells had lost much of their elasticity.

  But the trafficker wanted to keep her looking young, and so he’d taken a chance, figuring if she died during the conversion, it was no big loss.

  The cryogenic stasis combined with the anti-necrosis formula somehow to slow her aging exponentially, and 250 years later, she still didn’t look at day over 14, a Eurasian kid with short, jaggy black hair, a pierced button nose, a tattoo of a dragon on her neck … and a wicked, wicked temper.

  In fact, she’d displayed it the first time the trafficker had tried to smuggle her planetside, when, after six months in space together as a couple, she’d realized he was grooming her to be a prostitute.

  He pulled a piece, tried to force her to go with him. She grabbed a roll of guy wire, and strangled him with it.

  Jayde had been a nice kid before she’d died. But unless you were middle or upper management, not many people had time for ‘nice’ these days. And more than two centuries after coming back to life – including a stint in the war as a combat pilot – she was as tough as stone.

  Think about it: how big would the chip on your shoulder be if you were damn near immortal, but never got a day past middle school?

  If people treated you, at 250, as if you couldn’t take care of yourself or as if you didn’t count?

  She’d been smarter at 14 than most adults anyway. Now, she was stuck in a world of frustration where she knew more than just about anyone about anything, but was treated with indifference.

  Jayde had a big, big chip. She’d found one simple and effective method of working off that anger: helping me track down clients and, occasionally, whupping them upside the head with five tiny knuckles of fury.

  And flying my ship. At that, she was damn good.

  “It’s her birthday next week,” I said absent-mindedly, as Harrison leaned on the kitchen table with both mechanical elbows. “She’s going to be 251. What the hell do you get someone for their 251st?”

  Only a handful of other people were as old as her.

  Robert Cardale, the chairman of the Cardale Group, was close to 300, already middle-aged by the time Jayde had been born in 2002. A few of his closest cronies, including Hui-Matsumori chairman Penrice Deng, were also somewhere between 250 and 300 – although, like Cardale, they seemed more machines than men by that point, the ultimate cyborg survivors.

  Jayde despised the lot of them. Upper Management had made her first 30 years of second life a living hell, prodding and poking her to try and figure out her cellular metamorphosis. Eventually, they had given up, judging her unique and letting her go her own way. But it took decades.

  Harrison shrugged. “Tough call. Don’t know why a person would ever want to be that old. Up to the individual. I know I’m not gonna push things much longer.”

  That snapped me back to the conversation and I gave him a hard stare. “Don’t say that, pops. You know I don’t wanna hear that. You got a lot of years left.”

  He looked a little embarrassed. “Ah, come on kid, don’t make me feel awkward and shitty about it. You know my line of thinking on this stuff ….”

  Harrison would never admit it to his gangster cronies, but he believed in God.

  It certainly wasn’t a rare condition, even though most people considered religious faith exactly that – a mental health condition caused by too much reliance on community, a pure function of biology, understood and, in many ways, overcome by millions of self-reliant individuals in the centuries since its dominant era.

  It was the kind of thing a true Upper Management libertine would never tell another living soul, after all.

  Who believed in God anymore? It was just so … archaic.

  Science had long ago established that the universe had always existed, initially as pure energy, that nothing had “created” anything, that it was all sheer circumstance.

  It was all based on HB Particle Matter Generation, the one way in which energy could be transformed into a solid from a field or wave, its own cast-off matter molecules passing through its source field and gaining bulk as a consequence. Eventually, it was a big mass of solid matter. Then it blew up. Presto, universe.

  Really, this was grade school stuff. So the idea that some dude was behind a curtain somewhere pushing buttons that made it all happen? Man, I loved Harrison like a father. But that was just about the dumbest thing I ever heard.

  He certainly wasn’t alone, either. There were still a million or more people back on Earth who believed in God, and a few out among the stars.

  Several other species had near-identical “creator myths” and near-identical rationales for them.

  On Earth, those rationales came in the form of the Handbook of Joshua.

  If people centuries ago thought the old Bible been effective at reaffirming faith, they hadn’t seen anything yet. Under its original title, it had been a self-help manual on human behavior written by a little-known social theorist named Joshua Cross. It was one of the early proponents of the unified survival theory of all living things, which demonstrated how potent natural human biology related to survival instinct combined with social behavior patterns to create addictive group beliefs.

  The book pointed to cross-related scientific research and built a case that when people’s ideology overtook objective rationalization, they became literally addicted to the sensation of confidence that came with unchallenged perspectives.

  It clearly demonstrated how people became addicted to the old religions. The same mechanisms also made them join political groups and defend their illogical behavior, although without the beneficial specter of an afterlife involved, political addiction was easier to quit – as was addiction to any affirmative group.

  But the book also pointed out that science sees existence as a logical constant, which means it can never “disprove” that something – i.e. “God” – came before it.

  That such an “argument to ignorance” is considered illogical to scientists was irrelevant to believers. To them, the Handbook of Joshua was evidence that science and faith could co-exist, that people could have independent and inquisitive minds, yet still choose to believe in God, because science could never demonstrate that there isn’t one.

  Religions hated it. But then between the Handbook of Joshua – the later revisions named after the author – and dozens of other books arguing similar lines, old-school religions were obsolete within a century anyway. They were replaced with new-school faiths that blended moral codes with progressivism … and the glorification of God. They called it the “moderation reformation.”

  To me, the whole thing was garbage. Heck, if I was an Earther, I’d have been dead by now by law. You lived, you died. You made the best of it while living and put off the inevitable end for as long as possible.

  But to Harrison? I think
all that afterlife junk – and the idea of crossing over to something new – had become more appealing the longer he’d been around.

  Didn’t matter. I didn’t want him to die.

  I said, “Just keep in mind that you’re the one who’s always telling me there’s no point having all those creds unless you spend ‘em. If you’re not gonna bail me out, at least think about how much fun a new set of legs could be. You know, when the time comes.”

  He sucked on his tongue indignantly for a moment. “Fine, but if it spreads to my head and face, all bets are off,” he said.

  “If it spreads to your face it’ll be doing us all a favor,” I said.