Authors: Christopher L. Bennett
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Science fiction, #cookie429, #Extratorrents, #Kat
Daddy looked up at that. At first he didn’t seem to know where he was, like he was sleepwalking. But then his eyes focused on her. He was like a statue for a moment, and then he shook himself and stood up. “Ohh, Emerald … my jewel … it’s just us now … I’ll take care of you now.…”
But as he talked, something welled up in Emry, something terrible that burned her inside and tore out of her as the loudest scream she’d ever heard.
“NOOOO!!!!!!!!”
It went on for ages, and seemed to echo through the whole sphere like thunder.
He reached for her, but she punched at him, struggling in the Troubleshooter’s arms.
“You didn’t save her!!! Why didn’t you save her? You were supposed to protect her! You let her die! It’s your fault! I hate you!!
I hate you!!!!
”
The look in his eyes was like the one he’d had before—a look of terrible loss. But she didn’t care. He’d betrayed her. He’d failed her when it counted the most. She’d never hear her mother sing again, and it was his fault, and she knew she would hate him for the rest of her life.
4
Trouble Shared
July 2107
Pellucidar habitat
In orbit of Vesta
Emerald Blair took great satisfaction in punching herself in the face.
Not that it was actually her face, or even a reasonable facsimile. Rather, it was the face of the overearnest, underweight Vestalian starlet who’d played her in that unauthorized vidnet biopic last month, the one they’d rushed into production to capitalize on the Chakra City incident. They could’ve gone virtual, but apparently figured the starlet’s fame would be at least as big a draw as Emry’s own, since they couldn’t legally use her likeness anyway.
Of course, that hadn’t stopped Pellucidar’s control cyber from morphing the starlet’s likeness onto an android’s soligram skin and sending it to attack Emry. But Sorceress didn’t seem to have much use for human laws right now, including the ones about not killing people, or rather using her animatronic puppets to kill them.
You’d think a cyber programmed with every work of fiction ever made would know how clichéd that is,
Emry thought.
The shamdroid’s head snapped back far enough from the punch to warrant an obituary had it been the actual starlet. Emry’s fantasy to that effect was marred by the fact that the soligram layer had been smashed in, leaving a fist-sized hole in the middle of its face. But the smart-matter gel re-formed into the starlet’s celebrated features—
Hell, I’m prettier than that
—and the neck quickly returned to normal. “You can’t keep the Banshee down!” it cried. These androids were built to withstand a lot of punishment from the patrons, and Sorceress was no longer bothering to make them play dead.
It helped, though, that the cyber had picked such an ill-conceived opponent to stop her from reaching Pellucidar’s brain center. Sorceress seemed to think this was all a game, and apparently had decided it would be entertaining to pit Emry against an alternate version of herself. The starlet bot was dressed as the mod-gang member she’d been at seventeen, or some costume designer’s exaggerated notion thereof. She acted tough, but was too slight of build to pose much of a challenge, durability aside. Which was proving a disappointment to the gathering spectators.
Damn it, I don’t have time for this!
Emry thought as Banshee charged again.
Don’t these vackheads know they’re in danger?
It wouldn’t have surprised her from Earthers; they spent most of their lives immersed in their online world, interacting with virtual playmates, even conducting business transactions through gaming analogies. But Striders, ironically, tended to lead more grounded lives; spread out over cubic light-minutes, they didn’t have the option of real-time onlining, except on the local scale. And even there, they preferred to live in reality as a matter of cultural preference.
Yet Vestans tended to be eccentric. Vesta was in the “desert,” the ice-poor Inner Belt, its habitats only able to survive on imported water and carbon; but Vesta’s giant size and planetlike, differentiated geology gave it a mineral wealth unequaled in the Belt. So its civilization was heavy with entrepreneurs and elites, those who could not only afford to make the desert bloom but could do so in style. Here was the home, not only of the Striders’ cybernetic and metallurgical industries, but their jewelry industry, their entertainment industry, their gambling industry, their erotic industry. Here were the wealthy elites accustomed to having their way, and here were the prosperous Terran emigrés who sought the kind of luxuries they knew from home. Thus, Vesta was not as centralized as Ceres despite being nearly as populous. Instead of one united cluster and various outliers, Vesta was circled by multiple large, independent habitat-states and their various tributaries—the latter of which included Pellucidar, a theme-park habitat built by a Vestalia-based entertainment conglomerate but jointly managed by several Vestan states. It was an Earth-style immersive cyberfantasy with a Strider twist, relying as much on soligrams and bots as virtual projections. But there were still those who let themselves get too caught up in the illusions.
Emry threw Banshee over her shoulder, but the simulant rolled smoothly to its feet, wearing that patented Pout of Fury that made up half the starlet’s repertoire of expressions. “You dragged me down into this life!” she intoned, lunging at Emry with a flurry of inhumanly fast blows, keeping her busy dodging and blocking. “You made me a criminal! But no more, Javon! I’m free of you now! And I swear to the Goddess, I will devote the rest of my life to making amends for what you made me do, by fighting scum like you wherever—”
“Oh, shut
up
.” With a thought, Emry set her laser pistol to shock mode, then drew it and discharged it into Banshee’s scrawny torso, holding it there long enough to make sure the android’s circuitry was thoroughly fried. She’d been reluctant to waste the power on this petty obstacle, but damn, did it feel good. “You don’t know a vackin’ thing about it.”
Some in the audience cheered, while others groaned, wishing for a longer catfight. A moment later, though, they started screaming as electric discharges began raining down from the sky. Emry shoved them all under the nearby trees, resisting an insane urge to tell the Cheshire Cat in the branches to run for safety. Then she reviewed her visual logs, enhancing her peripheral glimpse of the attackers’ forms against the patchwork landscape of the Bernal sphere’s far side.
Damn, the Zelkoids are back!
“Hey, Zephyr, any luck? I could use some backup here, you know!”
“I’m not exactly lounging on the veranda myself,”
came a wry, mellow baritone over her selfone.
“I’m hacking my best, but Sorceress is a grand-master player.”
“Zephy, baby, this isn’t a game!”
“In fact, Emry, that’s exactly what it is. To her, anyway. She hasn’t tried to harm me, just impede me.”
A lightning-gun blast set fire to the tree sheltering Emry, forcing her to break cover and run across the clearing. “Why can’t she extend the same courtesy to the rest of us?”
Zephyr switched to her transceiver implant so she could hear him over the blasts.
“Great, so she’s schizophrenic!”
“Come again?” She tucked, rolled, and fired skyward.
. No offense, but your reality can get rather dull.>
“I wish!” Emry shot back. But she supposed Zephyr knew whereof he spoke. Until recently, he hadn’t had a physical body either, serving as one of the top data-miners at TSC headquarters. Arkady had liked him and had often tried to talk him into becoming a Troubleshooter’s steed, ideally Emry’s once her apprenticeship ended, but he’d shown no interest in fieldwork. Perhaps Zephyr’s words now offered some insight into why. But after Arkady’s death, Zephyr had changed his mind, agreeing to honor his friend’s wishes after all. Emry hadn’t been sure she wanted a reluctant shipmind, but so far Zephyr had been nothing but reliable and dedicated, and charming company to boot.
“She doesn’t understand the difference between fantasy and reality. I get it. Now how the flare do we fix it?” She spotted the Zelkoid command saucer and began firing at it, knowing that destroying it would send the cyclopean green monsters back to their home dimension—or whatever the closest approximation would be in this setting.
Who says
Annie Minute
wasn’t educational?
The beam fizzled out, so she ejected the power pack and plugged in another from her belt. The gun was growing hot in her hand. “I’m almost to the brain center, Zeph. I don’t want to have to hurt her, but if you can’t lock her into autistic mode—” A basso roar hit the air. “Aww, vack, I think the dragon’s coming back!”
“Don’t worry, Emry, you’re not the target,”
he said aloud over her selfone.
“I asked Sorceress to find out how the Zelkoids would fare against it.”
“You mean—you got through to her?”
“We’ve been having quite a lively debate for the past few seconds. It took some doing, but I think I’ve persuaded her to accept my basic premise that reality and fantasy are two different things. Personally, I suspect she’s just humoring me. I think she likes me.”
Emry laughed, even as the dragon began tearing through the Zelkoid lines and sending them scattering. “You little Lothario! See, I told you that voice of yours could melt any gal in her boots.”
“Anyway, I’ve convinced her to take some time off to explore the philosophical ramifications of the idea. The simulations should be shutting down even now.”
“Yep,” Emry confirmed as the dragon, Zelkoids, and other manifestations began slumping to the ground and reverting to raw soligram form. “They’re melting, they’re mell-tinnggg!”
“What a world.”
“And what a sidekick! What a team, huh?”
“Who are you calling a sidekick? I did all the work. You were just the damsel in distress.”
His voice grew more serious.
“And you know you could’ve avoided a lot of it if you’d stayed more detached about your virtual opponents.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just, Banshee clicked my buttons, you know?”
“And this is an excuse how?”
Emry winced. Sometimes Zephyr reminded her so much of Arkady. That brought her both pain and comfort. “You’re right, I—what the hell are
you
looking at?”
Some of the spectators had drawn near, gawking at her. A gangly teen dressed rather unconvincingly as Sam Murai, Private Eye, with a trench coat and fedora over a t-shirt patterned like medieval Japanese armor, tilted his head and spoke. “So—you’re the real one?”
“The one and only!”
“Hmp.” He stared some more. “You were cuter in the movie.”
Emry slowly, carefully holstered her sidearm.
* * *
Pellucidar’s various managing partners soon moved in to “secure” the theme park and began bickering over whether Sorceress should be reprogrammed or destroyed altogether—and over which Vestan state had the right to make that determination. Emry wasn’t exactly a fan of the cyber—she had killed six people, after all—but the thought of anyone being put to death because they had no legal rights outraged her, and she made that known to the Vestans. The one thing they could agree on, however, was that they didn’t let outsiders dictate their policies.
The matter was rendered moot when orders came in to report to the TSC’s local branch headquarters as soon as possible. Emry didn’t see the need; this Gregor Tai fellow from Ceres had been meeting with small groups of Troubleshooters as their availability allowed, and Emry had picked up the gist of it from them, how his Earth-backed consortium had offered to provide the Corps with new backing and resources. Sure, she couldn’t blame Earth for wanting to pay more attention to events out here after Chakra City, and it was easier to be sympathetic to them now. But Emry hated abandoning Sorceress to her fate.
“You did the best you could, Emry,” Zephyr told her as he kneaded her sore muscles that night, the thrust of his engines as he moved into a polar orbit holding her against the massage pad without the need for straps or handholds. “I think you made her case to the press very well. And nationalist egos aside, a Troubleshooter’s endorsement carries a lot of weight.”
His words brought her some comfort, as did the touch of his soligram avatar. She’d chosen it to look like a marble statue of a nude, clean-shaven Greek god with graceful white wings, not unlike the Zephyrus of myth, but its hands felt like warm flesh—and secreted their own lubrication. “If anybody listens. All the attention right now’s on that Tai guy.”
“People pay attention to you.”
“Sure, ’cause I’m the sexpot with the cinematic past. I’m someone they gawk at, not someone they listen to. That won’t help Sorceress.”
The avatar smiled. It wasn’t just a simulation; cyber emotions may have been less intense than the human kind, without hormones to fire them to passion, but a sapient mind, guided by choice and experience rather than rigid programming, needed motivations to impel action and shape behavior. She knew by now that Zephyr’s kindness was real. Sometimes she was sorely tempted to take his avatar to bed, but without a skeleton like Sorceress’s toys, it could never hold up to her affections. Plus she didn’t think it would be fair to Zephyr to try to relate to him as a human instead of as himself. “You’re also the one who saved Earth from a bioterror attack and the patrons of Pellucidar from a very clichéd demise,” he said. “I’d call that a respectable beginning.”