***
Short Space can be dangerous. It can also be entirely uneventful, and that was the case this time around, thankfully.
We were running dry on creds, and the idea of blowing a ton of money on ammunition was not appealing.
Within 25 minutes, we were jumping back into Sol System Prime. Web-like Tendrils of white light threaded through the cockpit as the dimensional rift pulled us in, then spit us back out into our own space, before imploding upon itself, the ship’s rear shields absorbing and utilizing the concussive force to propel us forward, without extra thrust even being required.
We needed the fuel savings, and a few hours either way wouldn’t make a difference.
Jayde swung us into the trade lanes running past Jupiter. Traffic was busy, and she threw the Esmeralda into cruise, letting the lane controls guide us along, keeping a uniform distance between vehicles ahead and behind us.
She swung her chair around 90 degrees, then fished a bottle of liquor from inside her flight suit.
“Want a snort?”
I shook my head. “Are you gonna do any actual flying between here and Earth? I mean, that is what I pay you for, right?”
She shrugged. “Boss, you pay me to get us from ‘a’ to ‘b’. We’re on our way to ‘b,’ so relax.”
She took a shot back and screwed her face up in a pained expression as the bite of the liquor hit.
Then she unceremoniously hawked up a ball of phlegm and spit it into the disposal vent by the cockpit door.
I sighed audibly. “Charming.”
She smiled acidly. “You didn’t hire me to be Miss Manners.”
“Speaking of which …”
“What?”
“Well … look, I know it’s gotta be tough, trying to save any money on what I’m paying you. And I know you’d like to be flying something newer…”
“You’re really selling the life right now boss, you know that, right?”
“Yeah… well, that’s kind of my point,” I said. “You could be doing a lot better than this, with your skill. You know it, I know it. So, I guess what I’m saying is I wouldn’t begrudge it if you wanted to find a new ride…”
I was expecting maybe a little gratitude.
Instead, she just looked pissed. “What, I’m 250 years old, and I’m not smart enough to put something away? You think I need this shit?”
“I just assumed…”
“I look like I’m 14, so you think I spend money like a teenager?”
Well, she did. But damned if I was gonna raise that issue.
“I just thought…”
“You just thought you’d play martyr and help out the poor little female. I pick my own rides, jackass. I like this one … for now.”
I held up both hands. “All right, all right, don’t get ‘em in a twist.”
She took a slug from her small chrome flask. “Damn straight.”
Eight hours later, we were in upper Earth orbit, waiting for clearance from New Tokyo Station.
Then, it was a matter of a holding pattern until the ship crossed into the automated landing and retrieval zone.
Jayde cut the engines and the broad blue beam guided us slowly down, until we were hovering once more perhaps a half-kilometer above the landing.
Then it was an hour-long wait for a slip before Esmeralda hissed into place on her grey-cement docking pad, displacing steam and smoke in clouds as the engines’ heat met the cool fall air and drizzling rain of New Tokyo.
After she’d talked to the port master and ensured we could pick up the tab later, Jayde joined me in the station’s main concourse and we walked down to street level.
I said, “I figure we logon here, head to Yomiuri Stop, see who’s been trolling around the security firms, getting recommendations for an operations base.”
She pointed up at the low-lying clouds of steam, smoke and pollution a few hundred meters above us.
“Thinking one of the big hotels?”
I nodded. “There are five in Tokyo alone that cater to over a million a day. Pretty easy to lose a group of 20 or 24 guys amid 400 floors’ worth of rooms, and they charge a pretty cred, so there’s no great compunction to give up information easily. They protect their clients’ privacy.”
At street level, New Toyko was like most of Earth, which is to say it was precisely the opposite of what off-worlders expected.
Earthers’ reputation as backwards painted a picture of constant traffic, pollution and din. They got the second one right, but it was industrial, not transportation exhaust. Everything else was way off.
For one, compared to other cities around Sol System, it was quiet. Not silent, but close.
Private road vehicles had been banned for conservation reasons a century ago, and public transit was solar electric; no combustion equaled no engine noise.
People spent as little time out in the real world as possible, so there was minimal pedestrian traffic, just freeversers and the odd unclassifiable outcast.
Most workplaces were virtual, as were most malls, parks, daycare centers, candy shops, massage parlors… you name it, and it no longer really existed at street level.
Instead, it looked like an old-school ghetto from the days before Quantum Mechanics, with one storefront out of every fifty home to a sad collection of offerings produced by Freeversers, the remnants of the old, non-virtual societies: hand-stitched clothing, old-style “vegetables”, whatever that meant, even some antique “software”: personally-owned, prehistoric versions of modern online services for prehistoric systems, long since jury rigged to run off modern solar cells.
They sold all of this junk, and they did it with a system they called “Fair Trade”, the concept of which was each side tried to give the other a product or amount of creds of roughly equivalent value to what they were receiving.
The Big Six spoke in glowing terms of the Freeversers publicly, but anyone involved in law enforcement – and I knew a few – could attest that the corporations routinely swept down upon Freeverse communities with raids designed to maim, injure, and break up its leadership.
They hated the idea of fair trade, called it leftyism and socialism. Whenever it became too popular, crackdowns followed.
So there was a lot of suspicion at street level, a constant, simmering tension that meant a whole lot of people with the same social perspectives and objectives nevertheless kept a wary eye on one another, unsure who to trust.
The landscape around them was equally unfriendly: concrete pragmatism and giant propaganda billboards for Vega Personnel Inc., one of the Big Six. “Vance made it OFF WORLD! You can too!” the billboards declared, a giant, sunglass-wearing Vance Vega pointing his silk-suited arm and index finger at them, daring them to escape the flickering neon and near-toxic smoke.
We walked down Sudoske Prefecture Boulevard No. 1, steam rising up from the dark, gloomy street, the sun all-but-blotted out by the cloud cover and a steady mist of light acid rain coming down, soaking the transit stops and old boards covering various office building windows.
“Hate the weather here boss,” Jayde said, pulling up the collar of her coat. “Hate it. Don’t like having to keep an eye on our six all the time, neither.”
“You got that right,” I said.
Don’t get me wrong about Freeversers: lots of them were there for righteous, moral reasons that were, nevertheless, completely unrealistic. Others were just scumbags, social detritus that the system no longer allowed anywhere above street level. And right now, street level was where we found ourselves, looking for the first decent joint with private booths, so we could get down to business.
“Let’s hang a right here,” I suggested. “Looks better lit.”
Street-level infrastructure repair was poor to non-existent in the two centuries since the corporate takeover. We headed west, down Oh-Satori Street No. 2; apparently, the local hustlers and mental cases had the same appreciation for working streetlights, and we had to step around the odd street
person.
That shit never got any better, no matter how much new tech Earthers developed. There was always someone who couldn’t pay, couldn’t figure out their anxieties, their communal disconnection.
A flop hotel three blocks down offered the lure of by-the-minute MultiNet time and porn holos.
I looked at the sign and raised my eyebrows twice luridly at Jayde. She kicked me in the shin. “Idiot.”
Inside the lobby, a sputtering generic holo welcome visitors to the Hedeki Reiku Men’s Fitness Hotel and Spa. The place had seen better days, and the lobby bar was full of generically decrepit, creaky addicts. In their own way, they were just sputtering along as well, like a broken holo.
I found the room terminal and booked us an hour of real time, or about 10 hours in online scale.
The Archivist would have some local presence online at all times, perhaps surveillance operatives, or maybe a security team protecting a registration. If we could track them down, we might be able to intercept his message train and pinpoint his base location.
The room was at the end of the first-floor hallway. It was perhaps four feet wide, eight feet long, six feet high, little more than a cubicle. Two small metal frames with seats and handles facing forward took up most of the room. Each would suspend the seated individual about a foot of the ground, bent forward slightly, feet in stirrups.
We each climbed aboard and hooked up, then slid our blackout visors into place. After a few seconds, the system booted.
Sensors locked in on each of our limbs, the blackness in front of us crackled and spluttered for a few moments … and then we were in, standing on an alabaster marble station platform, in front of the shuttle to Yomiuri Stop.
I looked Jayde up and down. She’d aged 30 years, and studied her avatar for a moment approvingly, holding her hands out in front of her and studying her own arms. “Shit boss, I really held it together after I hit my 40s,” she said wryly.
I smiled but didn’t respond. I never knew quite what to say when she displayed her insecurity about her appearance so blatantly. Almost anything was bound to be disastrous. Besides, even the 40-year-old Jayde made me feel parental and protective.
We boarded the shuttle, looking at the uninterested, bored commuters, mostly dressed in approximations of clothing from the real world. It all spoke to a certain lack of … imagination.
It’s worth pointing out that when I say the MultiNet was as real as the real thing used to be, I’m not kidding. The latest trend was for residential block cities to vote on their environment daily, people picking from a “greatest hits” package of famous weather through the ages, based on historical record and meteorological modeling: “Spain, 1963” might compete on any given day with “Jamaica, 1867”, “Brazil 2021”, and “South Korea, 1972.”
And presto, when you stepped out onto the sidewalk of any given hub city, it was in the climate of choice, in the country or city of choice.
On this occasion, the public evidently pined for nuclear winter or Norse mythology or something, because it was snowing and chilly when we got off the train. Another passenger saw us standing on the platform, shivering, and leaned over by way of explanation to note, “Montreal, 1976. We’re where the suburb of Dorval would normally be.”
Virtual cities were designed to allow a “locational overlay.” Although the entire city was there to explore – complete with virtual residents – the MultiNet’s permanent public locations, such as Entry and Exit Stops, overlaid them.
And none of it prevented people from going “private”, running Scenarios in private rooms scattered throughout.
“Jeez, the life these people lead, you’d think they’d vote for something tropical and restful every time,” I said, as we walked by a “depanneur”, which seemed to be some sort of cross between a bar and a corner store.
I nodded towards it and the blinking “Labatt 50” sign. “Want to try the local brew?”
Jayde shook her head. “Let’s stick to business. Time for that junk later if we need. Virtual buzz is a killer.”
She was right about that. Whatever bio-cognitive chemical manipulation went on during a “virtual” drinking session sure did make the person feel drunk – but the hangover the next day could prompt anyone to swear off the stuff.
I closed my eyes and flexed my left fist, triggering the setup utility. A few moments later, my light clothing had been replaced with heavy corduroy trousers, a thick rollneck sweater and a windbreaker.
“Better.” I looked over at Jayde, who was a step ahead of me. “A parka?”
She nodded. “Damn skippy. This is Canada.”
I pushed my foot down, feeling the crunch of the ‘snow’ under it. It was remarkable, vivid, one happy childhood memory among a thousand unwelcome ones, an image of Harrison and his late wife Edie on one side of their yard, and 13-year-old me on the other, determined to triumph in the war of the snowballs.
The crunching sensation even had a little slip to it, a little shaky traction, as compressed snow should.
Of course, the snow also demonstrated the MultiNet’s limitations. It just felt real; but it was a trick, a sensory deception. You couldn’t put the snow in your pocket, for example, and take a snowball back into the real world.
As such, the MultiNet was also useless for sustenance. You could “experience” virtual food, because it tricked the tastebuds and conformed to the tactile misrepresentation of reality. But it didn’t nourish or fill the user. For that, they had to log out, eat, and log back in.
It was also useless for getting any real benefit; although one could go to sleep on a MultiNet bed and feel like it was identical to the real thing, the user’s body was actually in the contorted positions demanded by the VirtuTech Life Chamber, and restless as all get out. Sleeping in the MultiNet just wasn’t restful.
From the perspective of some MultiNet critics, these limitations were valuable. They forced people to step back into the real world, at least twice a day, in order to eat or go to bed.
Most addicts only ate once daily, as a consequence. But given that the Big Six was attempting to rein in overpopulation, it didn’t hurt to have a few dying prematurely, either.
The MultiNet’s addiction stems from its dual nature. There are virtual neighborhoods throughout, some sophisticated and appealing, others bare bones. But they all share a division of space between public meeting and activity areas, and rooms designed for private scenarios and conversations.
It’s the only way to keep interaction online civil, separating those open to public discourse from those taking part in a private activity.
No one in a private online scenario is unfamiliar to the others in his or her group unless they want to be. And public areas are heavily policed: the Big Six gave MultiNet subsidiary franchise license holders – any company that could make a buck, really – the right to use force feedback, electrical feedback and any number of other very real, very tangible responses to breaking the law online.
It wouldn’t kill you, but it wasn’t pleasant.
The street scene ahead of us looked like something out of Dickens, though Jayde assured me it was old Montreal.
“We visited when I was a kid. They got it pretty close,” she said, nodding approvingly.
She looked around again. “Where to?”
I nodded in the general direction of nearby public square. “There’s a security specialist just off the square, Evgeny Salkhindov, specializes in tracking around Yomiuri, Mitsumi and Prokhorov Stops. Plus he does a little smuggling in the real world.”
“A real go-getter.”
I shrugged. “Evgeny’s a survivor. I haven’t seen him in a decade; back then he was running guns from K’Laar System to Dresden Station, trying to avoid the cops for long enough to buy a little place on the NTC.”
“So what happened?”
“Don’t know. Heard he’d quit flying and was happy to do it, but the next thing I hear, he’s an online shamus with a small staff of his own, and a s
hip in the real world he orders around, too.”
“Weird.”
“You got that right. Plus, he told me years ago he’d never want to work online, take the short, easy fantasy over the self-determined reality.”
She sighed. “Only, the self-determined reality can be pretty shit, too.”
I nodded but didn’t have anything more to add. She’d nailed it.
Evgeny’s red-brick building was a couple of blocks from the square. We could have walked it in virtual time, but the genius of the hub stations was that you could transport from any one of them to any map location with range of its spokes, as if you’d taken another public tube train there.
So after we both dialed in the location, we waited for two seconds, felt a sizzle in the air around us then found ourselves standing outside his offices.
“Functional,” Jayde said after we walked into the lobby. “So what would make him give up executive tenure for …what, one more decade, down here?”
I didn’t know. “Can’t just be MultiNet addiction. He was stronger than that,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s fiddled his way around the age limit somehow.”
Evgeny met us in the waiting area, hands outstretched. “Bob, my boy, I hear you are looking to see your old friend Evgeny, and it occurs to me that you might be about to bring trouble around. You know I’m not fond of trouble.”
I gestured towards his “face.” “You’re a lot prettier logged on,” I said. In the real world, his face was a roadmap of small scars and tension lines.
“It’s been a while.”
I agreed. “Been working out of the NTC, process serving.”
“Once a Smith, always a Smith, eh Bob?”
True enough. “I need help finding someone.”
He squinted. “It’s what I do. But you never were much for doing business on the MultiNet.”
I paused for a second, trying to think of a way to ask the indelicate question. “Ev, what the hell are you doing here? This doesn’t seem like you, man.”
Yeah, that was it. The subtle approach.
He shrugged. “Times changes. Priorities change.”
Keep in mind that the 40-year-limit was an Earth policy only. But with transit off-planet limited to Big Six staffers and those who could afford a private vessel – not an option for your average, indebted Earther – it amounted to a premature death sentence for the vast majority.
So for anyone to call being here a “priority” struck me as odd.
“Really? You still got the creds to get out of here if you want?”
He looked mildly annoyed. “I do OK. I’ve got my finger in other things.”
“Yeah? How much time are you spending online each day?”
“That’s a bit personal Bob, considering you haven’t said hello in years.”
“MultiNet years or real world?” I asked.
“Fuck you.”
I clapped him on the shoulder, laughing. “Relax, Evgeny. Holy creds, I’m on your side, remember?”
He smiled back. “We always made a good team, eh?”
Behind me, Jayde piped up. “Don’t introduce me or anything. I’m just the help.”
I sheepishly apologized. “Evgeny, this is my pilot, Jayde Chen. Jayde’s a trade war vet and a hell of a flyer.”
The intro was a calculated effort to get people to think before asking about her age, and Evgeny was smarter than most.
He bowed and kissed her hand. “Your humble servant madam,” he said, clicking his heels dramatically and eliciting an unladylike giggle from Jayde.
“At least your friends are polite,” she said, shooting me a sour glance.
Friend? That was a relative term. Evgeny and I had never been tight, but we’d been in tight spots. And guys tend to stick together in those situations.
The last time we’d worked together he’d been helping me evade a Forodian Hit Squad, the policing/assassination cadre from Forod, an occupied moon in the K’Laar system.
Or, at least that’s what I thought was going on. Turned out, the group chasing us was after him. This, in turn, was probably due to the 80 kilos of stolen ship parts that were stowed beneath his vessel’s floorboards.
Sure, Evgeny was polite. But he’d still steal your wallet and then spend an hour helping you look for it.
He showed us into his office, a self-contained miniature holosuite. Outside floor-to-ceiling glass walls, Montreal in winter had given way to a beautiful white sand beach and pale blue water, palm trees and people lazing around in swimwear.
He noticed me staring. “You still wanna know why I work here?”
I nodded agreement. But that kind of scenario, running constantly in the background? Must be taking up a ton of bandwidth, costing a ton of MultiNet time.
“You must be doing well,” I said.
Evgeny laughed and sat down behind his desk, then pushed a button under its top. A small end segment of the desk opened up automatically, revealing a bar.
“You want a drink? It’s as good as the real thing, I promise,” he said. Before we could answer, he’d pulled out a bottle of 100-year-old scotch.
I’ve never had a drink in the MultiNet before and figured one couldn’t hurt.
He handed me the tumbler, and it was cool against the skin of my hand, the curved glass smooth and flawless. He watched attentively as I raised it slowly and took a sip.
Well, goddamn. I’d had old scotch at Harrison’s years earlier, and – at least as far as my memory was concerned – the VirtuTech variety was bang on. I took another sip, feeling the sharp burn against the back of my throat.
Jayde said, “Geez, I can see why people get jacked on all of this. Beautiful surroundings, free booze, abundant business opportunities...”
Evgeny was nodding approvingly, but she continued.
“.... greed, waste, early death, impermanence, a complete absence of real freedom.”
He soured again. “Look, I’m sure the two of you didn’t log in just to visit me and lecture about how much better the real world is.”
I held up both hands, “Hey, sorry, my friend. Really. This is ... well it’s just not for us. But we don’t mean to judge.”
Evgeny seemed content with that. “To each their own, right?”
His office was a social trophy case, adding to my suspicion that Evgeny spent most of his time online, and was addicted.
A variety of digital photoframes were positioned around the room and on the walls, a litany of “achievement shields”, plaques for success at war play, golf, dining out, dancing. If there was an artificial scenario available to help inflate a user’s sense of self-worth, it seemed likely Evgeny had tried it.
“I need help finding someone,” I said. “I’m working as a process server out of the NTC. We need to find Archvist Dregba of G’Farg.”
“Have you thought about checking on G’Farg?”
“Very funny.”
“Well, I can’t say I’ve heard anything. You think it’ll be easier online than off? There’s a hell of a lot more people in the MultiNet than the real world.”
“Not the kind of guys we’re looking for.”
The archivist’s team would be protecting someone’s avatar – and real-world location – with heavy weaponry, I explained, probably in a private facility.
The archivist wouldn’t take the chance of being left vulnerable in the real world, so he was probably logging in and out from a secure location.
He thought about it. “So if I can find your fire team, you can backtrack their entry point?”
I nodded. “Once we know their entry stop and time of arrival or departure, some creds will buy us the logon point.”
Evgeny got up and poured us each a refill. “Worth a try – hey, don’t drink that too fast; the headache from this shit....”
“We know,” said Jayde. “So what’s the drill? You put it out on your network, let us know and the three of us go in together, guns blazing?”
The smuggler
from Novarodeskprospekt wagged a finger knowingly.
“Oh no. I don’t get involved in any wet work. I just locate and relocate. I call you, I give you directions, you go do your business.”
“What’s this going to cost us?” I asked.
Evgeny was thoughtful again. “For you guys ... 500 credits, a bargain rate for friends.”
That was interesting; perhaps Evgeny wasn’t the addict he appeared to be. “You want real-world cred? You sure you don’t want social? You get a lot of social credit for 500 in the real world.”
“Did I ask for social cred? Fuck that junk. I’ve got so much social cred I’ll never run out of it. No, real-world money only,” he said.
I didn’t have a lot of contacts, or a lot of choice. “You realize if we were off-world, you wouldn’t get 200 creds for this.”
He scoffed. “And I’m sure you realize in the real world I’d tell you to go fuck yourself.”