Book 3: 3rd World Products, Inc (7 page)

"If we see peasants with pitchforks and torches coming down the street, we'll boost the house field and call 911, Linda."

She laughed. “Yeah, you do that. They like to burn the things that they don't agree with. You might want to dig out your flak jacket and helmet, too. Just keep the agency and 3rd World out of things, okay?"

"They can interrogate me. They can torture me..."

"Yeah, good. Thanks. Well, is there anything else on your mind?"

"
You
called
me,
Linda. Are you more disturbed than you're letting on?"

"Maybe. I'm not sure yet. See you later, Ed. Bye. Oh, by the way, the next time you visit Europe, how about using your own passport and going through customs? If you'd been stopped for anything, you'd have caused an incident."

"Okay, Linda. Bye."

As I tapped the pad's ‘off’ icon, I realized that I really hadn't considered all of the potential turmoil that legitimizing Stephie might cause. I lived with her every day, so she was just my friend Stephie to me. To someone else she might be a very scary thing, indeed; as alien as ... well, as alien as any inhuman alien could be, especially when her holographic image appeared like some kind of tangible ghost.

Oh, well. The only way to counter superstition is to prove it wrong, even though there would still be those unwilling to embrace reason.

Stephie appeared and sat down in the sofa chair without a word, gazing at me thoughtfully. I swung my legs off the couch and sat up, then took a sip of coffee as I waited for her to say something.

After some moments of silence, Steph asked, “Do you think Linda is right?"

"Probably so. Anything new catches a lot of flak at first. There are people who stand ever ready to firmly and loudly oppose just about anything. Others will say you're being discriminated against and line up beside us in favor of your personhood. That's how women and blacks got the right to vote and the war in Vietnam was finally stopped. People stood together and demanded those things."

"I'm not sure that I'd like to be the cause of that sort of social unrest, Ed."

"It isn't worth worrying about, Steph. What you want can't hurt anyone, so if some people object, to hell with ‘em. How about fielding up some info on Spanish wrecks? Correspondence and records to tell us what was shipped and when, old maps and new, normal routes of travel, details about storms, and all that. Maybe we can narrow the search a little. I'd also suggest a hard look for a mile or so in all directions around any known wrecks. Could be they missed some goodies."

Stephie didn't put up a display field right away, so I sat back and waited for her to say something. Her words weren't long in coming.

"Ed, I very much want to be recognized as an individual, but I don't want to cause a lot of strife in the process."

"You won't. The only people who will be bothered and bewildered about you will be the ones who like to think that they already own all the answers in the universe, and it doesn't really matter a damn what they think, ‘cause they're always bothered and bewildered, anyway. Don't sweat it."

I cleared a 4'x4’ space in the garage for whatever treasure items Stephie might find. When she speculated that the space might not be big enough, I told her that we'd make space as necessary as long as she didn't bring home any cannons.

"By the way, Steph; we'll only offload stuff at night. We don't need the attention, either from the neighbors or the IRS and the state of Florida. Since you aren't considered either a citizen or a resident of either the US or Florida, they can damned well make you one if they want to tax you. Huh ... Come to think of it, that may be the shortest route to getting you certified. If you score big, the state and feds will definitely want a piece of it. We'll make ‘em acknowledge you first."

Stephie laughed. “Is that ethical, Ed? It sounds as if it borders extortion."

"Look up the tax rate on treasure. That's extortion, too. Tit for tat. You know, it might be a good idea to stash the stuff where it can't be found at all. My sheltering you and your loot would probably make them come after me in a tax squabble, and I'm sure they'd settle for a hefty fine as quickly as tax money. Think about where else you'd like to hide the booty, Steph."

"Will do."

The vagaries of weather and water meant little to Stephie, as did the amount of time she spent running sensor sweeps over the ocean floor. I went along on some of her first shallow-water sweeps and enjoyed immensely our first discovery during her first week on the job of the remains of a Spanish ship that had already been found and scavenged. There hadn't been much to call ‘treasure’ in that instance, but some of the artifacts the first scavengers had missed were suitable for museum display and quite interesting in their own right.

It fascinated me to watch her draw some heavily encrusted object through her field and have it arrive on her deck in pristine condition. She told me how she cleaned off the crud, but a lot of it made little sense to me. Apparently she simply combined or recombined atomic structures until the undesirable stuff no longer wanted to stick to whatever she'd found. A lump of what appeared to be rock, mud, or coral would seemingly shed its layers of crud like shells as it passed through her field, then the coin or whatever would proceed to the growing pile of treasure on her deck.

During one such cleansing of an item, I asked, “Steph, if you can rearrange the atomic structure of muck, is there any reason you can't just make your own gold?"

"I could do that,” she said, “But the energy expenditure would be enormous. To clean one of these coins, I restructure the molecules of detritus nearest to the surface of the treasure, then remove the covering from the coin. Manufacturing gold from ambient materials would cost me more than it would be worth in time and energy."

During her first week of scanning, she searched the areas around known wreck sites and their debris fields and found quite a lot that others had missed. The pile on the garage floor became big enough that I felt it necessary to stop by the local Home Depot and pick up a set of large metal shelves. Two of the six shelves were filled before the week ended.

Tiger had been curious about the new shelves. As he'd supervised my assembly of them, I'd told him—through Elkor—what they were for. After describing gold as metal and comparing it to a bolt, then saying that it was much more valuable, he sat on the half-assembled shelves silently for a while before sounding off again.

Elkor said, “Tiger would like to know if porpoises could assist Stephanie."

"How does Tiger even know that porpoises exist?"

"I once told Tiger about Bear, and that you had suggested that if I could communicate with porpoises, I might also be able to communicate with Bear. Tiger was most curious about porpoises, so I shared my data concerning them with him."

"Tiger's pretty sharp, isn't he? None of us thought to see if the porpoises could locate treasure."

"Yes, Tiger is quite intelligent, Ed. I have informed Stephanie and she is using one of my probes to query the porpoises."

"You guys work fast.” Keying my implant, I asked, “Steph, any luck with the porpoises?"

"Yes, Ed. Several say that they've played with objects such as I've described to them. They've agreed to relay any information that they may gather in their travels."

"Well, they do get around, but it could take a while to get any good feedback."

"That's essentially what they said, too. Their pods occasionally encounter each other while hunting, but they have no comprehensive communications network that extends beyond their individual groups."

Searching the ocean is a time-consuming task, even for an entity like Stephanie. My own business concerns—and the boredom of watching the seabed roll endlessly by—kept me from going along on every sweep, and so it was that I happened not to be aboard Steph the day she found a half-ton of gold coins and bullion amid the hull debris of a seventeenth-century ship.

Stephie burst out of the ocean and arced high across the Florida sky on her way to my house. With Tiger's intent supervision, I was designing a new pendant for WiccaWorks on my computer when she called me through my implant.

"Ed, are you busy? Can you spare a few minutes?"

"Sure, Steph. You sound ... Well, odd. What's up?"

"Oh, I found another wreck, that's all. I thought you might like to see it."

There was a curious quality to her Jessica Rabbit voice. Excitement? She'd found something; maybe something big. I decided to play cool and let her break her news.

"Well, gee, Steph, I'm kinda busy, you know, and I've already seen an old wreck. You think this one's worth the trip?"

"Oh, maybe. That's why I'm calling. I'd hate to drag you out there for nothing, of course, but I think you may need to pick up some more shelves. When's the last time you saw half a ton of gold in one place?"

"Oh, wow! You scored
big
, didn't you, lady? Not bad for a beginner. Yes, ma'am, I'd like to see that. How soon can you be here?"

I knew the answer to that question as a high-altitude sonic boom rattled my windows.

"I'm on my way down,” she said.

"And I'm on my way to the driveway, ma'am. Good going, Steph."

Elkor had already transformed his faux-feline golem into a transparent cat carrier and Tiger had stepped onto it. We had made it to the front door and stepped outside just as Stephie said, “I'm here. All aboard. Shake a leg. Get a move on. Hup hup."

A field closed around me and lifted me to her deck. I took a seat, then reached into Stephie's cooler field for a beer as I watched Tiger settle into his usual seat.

"Steph, that gold'll still be there in a few minutes, won't it?"

"If you'd looked in the cooler as you reached for that beer, you'd have seen that some of it has already been retrieved."

Oops. I'd missed her surprise. I was about to get up to go look when the canopy field opaqued and the cooler floated toward me. The lid opened and two bright bars of gold reflected sunlight at me. Picking one up, I hefted it and studied the markings on one side of it.

"Very nice, Steph. Very nice. One suggestion, though. Don't clean the bars and coins and be prepared to demonstrate how you do that. In fact, be prepared to let a few other people clean some and to field clean about half of them in a parking lot with news cameras rolling. We don't want anyone questioning their authenticity. We'll set up some kind of display to kick off the whole show."

As we leveled off at about thirty thousand and began a rapid forward motion, Steph asked, “The whole show, Ed? What whole show?"

"We'll combine authenticity verification, public demonstrations of your cleaning method, initial sale offers, and the matter of your recognition as a person. Remember our trip to Cuba, when we never touched the ground? That's how we'll handle this, too, for now. At no time will anyone other than me see that loot anywhere but on your deck. Since you never actually land yourself on the ground and we won't tell them where you found the stuff or where you stash it, there'll be a question of whether the US, Florida, or anyone else has a valid tax claim. As soon as they mention taxes, we'll mention your desire to become a legal person and see if we can't come to an agreement."

"You technically own me, remember? Won't they just hand the tax bill to you?"

"They'll want to, of course. They may even try, but we'll stage your show in another country. I'll deed the house and car to Sharon in advance, pack a few things, and we'll stay outside the US as long as it takes to get the job done."

"I'm not sure that's such a good plan, Ed. If they don't cooperate, you may encounter difficulties that you haven't considered. What if you can't return to the US?"

"I've been on my own in Europe before, Steph, and I don't have a better plan at the moment. Do you? Something that accomplishes all of our goals at once? You may launch when ready, ma'am."

Ordinarily a passenger would feel nothing much when Stephie started moving, but in this case, I think she meant for us to share her excitement. I was pushed slightly back into my seat as she leaped skyward. Tiger instinctively hunkered and tried to get a grip on his seat with his claws, even though it wasn't really necessary.

"Um, Steph, are you maybe a little excited about things?"

"What makes you ask that, Ed?"

"Oh, maybe the fact that I feel as if I'm in an Apollo capsule, riding a booster rocket into space. It seems as if your inertial dampers are fritzing, ma'am. May we assume that you're not defective and that you may be somewhat excited?"

"It wasn't that bad and no, I am not defective. I am a little excited, Ed. Aren't you?"

"Yup, but mostly because you are. Gonna tell me all about how you found it?"

What ensued was one of those excitedly told
'and there I was ... ‘
stories. She'd been cruising along, sweeping the ocean bottom in uniform strips, when a dense and fairly large anomalous mass well ahead of her had begun to register.

Almost as soon as she'd sensed the larger mass, smaller masses—some quite tiny—had begun to appear in a random pattern below her. They'd been coins, ballast, cannon balls, and other objects that had formed the debris field of the sunken ship. She'd shaped a field into a probe and picked up some of the loose stuff to show me.

"I could have brought everything home,” said Steph, capping her story. “But I thought it might not all fit into that relatively tiny space in the garage."

"Good thinking. Measure twice, dump once. Commendable trait, ma'am."

Tiger sounded off. I didn't need a translation to know that he'd interpreted the word ‘trait’ as ‘treat'. He hopped down to sit by the console and looked expectantly up at me as he repeated his querying “Yahh?” sound. I put the bar of gold on the deck near him and he sniffed it, then completely ignored it, as expected. Leaving the gold where it was, I opened Steph's console and fished out the vastly more important kitty treats.

Some forty miles from shore (you needn't know which shore) Stephie entered the water at around thirty miles per hour and let herself sink to perhaps fifty feet. The bottom was well below us and unseen as she turned south and increased her speed.