Authors: Christopher McKitterick
“
Your ID is now the single most resonant point in the nets,” Nooa says, “except when Director Herrschaft is operating at 3-station max.”
Jonathan feels a lance of fear cool his neck. “Shit, Nooa! I must be like a beacon—”
“
Don’t worry,” she answers, “I’m screening your signal. Not even Herrschaft can sense you unless he specifically seeks you out, and even then I could block.”
“
He’d notice that.”
“
Yes, but he can’t stop me.”
Jonathan feels another flash of ice-lightning jag through his meat, but says nothing. He has the feeling he is naked and small and being watched from every angle—and not by human eyes.
It takes only a second to identify the source of the 3VRD named Nooa; CityNet shrinks to one star in the thousands, millions, that compose the star-cluster of WorldNet. Jonathan stares for a few seconds, in awe of his new powers. He feels as if he could reach out and hold this thing, this precious sphere of glittering energy, this ball of crystals and fragile energy-strings that flash on and off faster than his unamped mind could watch. Thousands of orbiting crystals—dimmer and some as tiny as household servers—sail high above the intricate mesh through a black sea, seemingly held captive by webs leading down to the sphere. Geology or its god, gravitation, means nothing here; only the gods of data transfer are represented.
The biggest and brightest satellite is the Brain. Jonathan zooms in and that crystal becomes a multifaceted world of its own. The trace ends there, in sector 116, GenNet OX33928A. Nooa’s home.
Home
. As if some contact in Jonathan’s mind clicks shut, the precious object suddenly looks cold and lonely. He shuts down the overlay.
“
So you are the Brain’s ambassador, I guess.”
He immediately initiates a new trace to locate Captain Jackson. With his amp, it takes only a few seconds of zooming from ganglia to local node to a shut-down card only meters away. Jonathan shivers.
“
What the fuck’s going on?” he says aloud. Nooa amplifies herself and overlays his overlay—putting herself in front of everything else Jonathan sees. Something a normal person would—could—never do, but then Jonathan doesn’t know any normal people.
“
You located Pehr Jackson here, as well, didn’t you?” Her face literally glows, an effect either of Jonathan’s amp or something from the Brain, Jonathan can’t be sure which. “This is wonderful! Go to him right away, ask. . . .
I’m sorry. Please go to him and ask how he got here. He’s on top of the trash in—”
“
I know where he is.” Jonathan shuts down all his overlays and maps, except for
Lone Ship Bounty
, which he leaves at one side, and blocks out Nooa’s 3VRD. She vanishes as he takes a deep breath and starts climbing the junk. At the top, Jonathan sees a man swamped in shadow and oversize clothing. He stops when he’s within reach of the prone figure.
“
Why are you lying here?” Jonathan asks with his mouth.
The man’s eyes flick open. He stares at Jonathan, blinking.
“
Well, are you going to do it now or what?” the man asks.
He sounds incredibly like Captain Jackson, the booming voice, the right tones, the proper rhythm. But he can’t be, not when the real Captain is aboard a damaged vessel millions of kilometers away.
“
Who the hell are you?” Jonathan asks.
“
Why won’t you leave me alone?” The man rises to his knees, menacingly. Jonathan takes a step backward, tripping on something metal and sharp. He falls, the back of his head colliding with damp cardboard.
“
Are you okay, kid?” a rough, chalky face like the Captain’s asks.
Jonathan leaps to his feet and overlays the internal map. He readies himself to test how strong a pulse he can send now, with the amp.
“
I asked who the fuck are
you
,” he yells, his voice thin and high.
The man exhales and seems to shrink.
No
, Jonathan thinks
, that’s not my Captain. Captain Jackson is proud and strong and tall; this man is soft and rounded
.
“
I wish I knew,” the man answers. “I think my name’s Pehr Jackson.”
Jonathan studies him for a second; he’s an excellent actor if he’s not a dupe. “So you really don’t know. Someone’s fucking with you, too.” Jonathan shuts down the map overlay.
He glances around at the mound of garbage. None of the local gangs have noticed them yet. “What’re you doing here?”
The man looks down at bare feet streaked with recently dried blood. “Waiting.”
“
For what?”
“
None of your business!”
Jonathan unconsciously takes another step back, but then his stomach burns with anger. “Don’t yell at me, mister. Waiting for what, orders from the Brain?”
The word
NOOA
begins to blink before Jonathan’s eyes. He erases it.
“
Right,” the man says, “and then I’m going to hop aboard a fresh battleship and fly for months out past Mars and on to Neptune where I’ll blow up their battle-stations, drop a nuke on an alien artifact, and then step inside with a Nik scientist. Ha! Blast off, kid.” He turns away from Jonathan and begins climbing down toward the sidewalk.
“
You think you’re Captain Jackson, don’t you?”
“
I said, blast off.”
“
Don’t mess with me, mister. You don’t know who I am.” Jonathan doesn’t need to try to sound dangerous. His whole body pushes out each word. “I want to know why my
. . .
why someone would want to play Captain Jackson.”
The man stops moving once he reaches the cement. “Listen, kid. Say, what’s your name?”
“
Jonathan.”
“
Jonathan. Listen. I’m thinking that maybe I was part of some show that was supposed to be live but wasn’t. I’m an actor, I think.” He puts big hands up to the sides of his head, as if to support its weight or cover his ears. “Something’s gone wrong with my cards or my mind. I can’t be trusted or believed. . .”
The man continues to talk, but instead of listening, Jonathan touches the NOOA prompt floating in front of him and activates the girl.
“
Is
Lone Ship Bounty
a live or bullshit recorded show?” he asks.
“
Technically not live,” she answers, seemingly not bothered by having been blocked out. “Half-second editing.”
“
How could this be Captain Jackson if right now—or, a half second ago—he’s out at Neptune?”
“
That’s light-hours away, Jonathan. The feed you’re seeing is slightly altered and hours old. He could be here.”
“
How?”
“
Who are you talking to?” the man asks. Jonathan blushes; it’s been a long time since his meat and mind spoke simultaneously when he didn’t choose that.
“
Show yourself, Nooa,” he says. Nooa turns to face the man, who now sees her.
“
Hello,” she says. “You must be Pehr Jackson. I’m Nooa, a construct of an AI called the Brain.”
“
That’s enough!” the man shouts. Raging, he looks more like Captain Jackson. “This is a bunch of shit, like this whole city, this whole world is a bunch of shit! I don’t want to know why you’re doing this, but I’ve had enough. Kill me, beat me up, or leave me alone.”
“
You listen to
me
, mister,” Jonathan says. “Nooa is the Brain’s 3VRD. You want proof? Here.” He taps Nooa on the shoulder and she turns to face him. “Have that robovendor come back here and buy this man dinner, on the city.”
“
Okay, Jonathan.”
The bulky yellow machine, half a block away, grinds and whines in a broad circle across the street, rolls toward them through wedges of shadow and light, then goes through the same process it did for Jonathan a few minutes ago. The man takes the plate of “McHardy, 60% real beefsteak, with farm-fresh carrots and potatoes,” and stares at it as if it might leap up and bite him.
“
So you have access to someone on the city’s payroll,” the man says, starting to eat with the plastic knife and fork provided, holding the tray against his stomach.
“
Burn, man,” Jonathan says. He begins to walk away. “Don’t you dare keep pretending to be Captain Jackson, either.”
Nooa runs to catch up to Jonathan, then passes him and stops in his way. “Jonathan, you have to help me. I need to find out how he got back here so quickly. This could be important.”
“
You really think that’s Captain Jackson? Damn, I didn’t think the Brain could be fooled.”
“
That is him, Jonathan.” She keeps talking even as he shoulders past her. The Brain was so thorough creating Nooa that Jonathan feels her brush against him.
“
It couldn’t be anyone else,” she says.
“
Oh yeah? And it could be him? You tell me exactly how that’s possible. You know everything, right? How’s that possible?”
Nooa shrugs. “I don’t know. It must have something to do with the alien artifact Jackson entered on Triton.”
“
Triton?”
Just then, the
Bounty
is hit a third time. Jonathan shifts the show toward the center of his pov, angry that he missed so much. The cabin lights flicker, smoke billows through the room, Eyes pulls the trigger on his subgun, Captain Jackson begins laughing maniacally, and then the pov goes dead with a flash of red. Jonathan sees detail that the average, unamped subscriber wouldn’t: universal toxic symbols, bloody corpses; he even feels painful and irritating fivesen feed. Then he watches from an external pov as the spacecraft explodes and spins, burning, toward a pale green-and-orange moon.
He can’t say a thing for a long time. The show keeps running, silent, hollow. After a while, Nooa speaks.
“
That’s not real. This is what really happened.”
The pov whips back inside, and Jonathan watches Captain Jackson tie up Eyes as the
Bounty
wobbles. Janus—the pilot—and the Captain look tired and angry. They both seem to have gained weight and their faces to have aged.
“
I don’t understand,” Jonathan says. His knees feel weak; the second of the two people in the whole world that he let in past his defenses just died, or didn’t. . . .
“
EarthCo Feedcontrol Director Herrschaft is editing in false feed and running it as true-live. I do not know why.”
“
So he’s still alive?” Jonathan notices he’s holding his breath, waiting for an answer.
“
I believe you just spoke to him. I theorize he returned to Earth through an alien artifact that may be a transportation device.”
Jonathan turns and runs back toward the man. He slows and matches the man’s walk. “Tell me about the artifact.”
The man’s thick eyebrows rise for a moment, his eyes seem to light up, but then the animation fades. “I don’t know.”
“
Shut up and act like a man,” Jonathan says. “If you’re really Captain Jackson, you wouldn’t be acting like such a wimp.”
“
Watch it, kid,” the man says. “I remember about an alien artifact, yeah, but it’s impossible. . .” His voice sags again.
Jonathan whips his body like a streetfighter he once watched and uses the palms of his hands to push the man against a steel wall blemished with rust-spots like inorganic flowers; the other seems too stunned to react.
“
Knock it off, mister! The Brain thinks you’re Jackson, you think so, too, so let’s hear it. Tell me about the artifact. And think about this: Only the real Captain Jackson would know what I mean by that—the show has you getting killed in space.”
The man shakes himself loose of Jonathan and takes a deep breath. His mannerisms are exactly like Captain Jackson’s. Jonathan finds himself wanting this to be his hero. But it’s too strange. Except. . . .
The Brain thinks so. This guy, himself, thinks so.
And alien technology on Triton? Anything’s possible
, Jonathan tells himself. Hadn’t he heard once that not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine?
Jonathan finds himself hoping—an annual event, if that frequent—that he has something to believe in. And, in hoping, he feels as if he has finally awoken from some long, repulsive slumber, packed with nightmares of pain and blood and stifled rage, and loss—oh, loss so great and gross that he cringes just remembering. Everything in the whole world he wanted has slipped away, even his sister who had never been his; he wrecked it all, lost it all.