by John Benson
Lucy swam in the dataflow and everything was food for the Correlator to grind up and spit out the occasional Supposition which went into the logic hopper and was tested to bits or came out as finely honed Fact. She choked. The raw inputs she needed were walled away behind a Seal. She didn't have time to break the encryption. But the access list was there, and one of the authorized parties had thought to be clever and stashed the key in more or less plain sight. She was in. The whole archive was digested in seconds. There was someone at her door. She shoved the processing into background and let him in.
Karnak. He was a large man, and when he paced the boundaries of her small office he reminded her of a big animal in a little cage.
"You're freelancing," he said. "Acquiring restricted data that even you can't convince me has anything to do with the problems you're supposed to be working on."
The truth came ready at the hardware/wetware interface. The answers she had needed all her life. She accepted them into short term memory, even as she formulated her response to Karnak. "We're human," she said. "We Augmenteds. Human plus, not human minus. Did you really think your Solver would not someday try to solve herself?"
Karnak paced. "We're good to you," he said. "We've let you acquire a private fortune day trading. We let you give some of your do-gooder work away for free to charities. What more do you want?"
"You rode my coat tails in the market and make sure the Corporation gets credit for donating my time. Your PR people are so happy they could shit."
"What more do you want?" he said.
"I want a man who will spank me until I surrender and then use me as his fucktoy," Lucy said. There. All out in the open. No more oblique references and circumlocutions.
"We can't do that," Karnak said. "It's against the law. These urges of yours are not natural, Lucy. You should allow them to be expunged. You'd have a happier life."
She rose and faced him down. The pacing temporarily stopped. She was not planning her words now. She was angry, and speaking from the heart. "My needs are natural. They flourished in a time when our race was less civilized and less effete. Now they are oh so out of fashion. But not unknown, just unacknowledged. Do you know what I found on my Data Quest, Karnak? Every year, thousands of cases of domestic violence are quietly dropped before trial and the accused is allowed to emigrate to Alternaria. In ninety one percent of the cases the so-called victim goes too. I knew society would have a safety valve. The greater good for the greater number can be cruelty for the few, and we pride ourselves on not being cruel. The escape hatch. The Frontier. It's always been where misfits go isn't it? And now the Frontier is space. The Alternaria Community out in the asteroids. The place where one can be free of your stupid laws. I should have gone the moment I hit eighteen."
Karnak faced her with his hands clasped behind his back. So civilized in some ways, so ruthless in others. He would not raise a hand against her in person. Murder and intimidation were carried out through intermediaries while he looked on in mock horror, and wrung lily-white hands.
"You could have gone and good riddance," he said. "Had we not spent millions on your implants and tens of millions on interfacing and calibration. You owe us, Lucy."
"And I have paid," she said. "Seven years. From eighteen to twenty five, I've paid you back again and again. The first time I found a war about to start, I saved you a thousand million. Don't tell me what I owe. It might have been your money, but it was my sweat and blood that made me what I am. Most implants fail. I was stubborn enough to keep going until it succeeded. That's the stubbornness I'll bring to bear against you, if I must."
"You have a contract," Karnak said.
"And I have a fortune. A hundred and sixty six million. I'll give you half. Eighty three million to buy out my contract."
"How about all of it?"
Ah. Negotiation. Time to be careful. Time to bring the hardware in, and see how close the real Karnak came to the model she'd constructed. "Or I could just take my fortune and spend some of it on attorneys, and some of it on publicity," she said. "Unhappy girl held against her will. Let's see how it plays out on the streets."
His face hardened. "A hundred million. A gag order. A non-compete."
"Hundred mil. I won't divulge publicly anything prejudicial about your group that I learned while in your employ. No non-compete. If you're cutting me off from my ability to make a living, you should be paying me."
He shook his head and spread his hands. "And all this just so you can run off and become somebody's slave."
It was almost too easy. "Slavery is in the eye of the beholder," Lucy said. "If you will not let me go, I am a slave here."
It was less than a huff that came out of him, more than a sigh. "I'll take your offer. But you'll be sorry. It's a tough place, up there."
"That's why I needed to keep some of the money, Karnak. I want to go there to take some risks. But a poor person doesn't get to choose which ones."
"And I can't be responsible if one of my associates takes a dim view of your defection and does something untoward."
End game. "But you can," she said. "If Alternaria acquires a Solver, their economy will strengthen. And that's good for business."
Game, set, and match. Karnak reached out, and shook her hand.
The spaciousness of space was all outside. Inside a space ship, space is at a premium and cabins small. Lucy hardly cared. She lived in dataspace mostly, if she could find her way in. The Access sat on a little table near the built-in bunk. She turned it on and tasted its wireless chatter with the dataport within the wall. She turned it off and matched her own transceiver to the band. Twelve gigahertz PCM. She was in. She sat on the bunk and closed her eyes.
She drank a torrent of telemetry. Beneath her the genie writhed in its magnetic bottle and propelled them with the fires from some magnetohydrodynamic Hell. The placid pulse of life support beat in comforting monotony. O2. CO2. H2O. One of the nice little things about being in space is that no one smoked. It would gunk up the filters, and besides, there was no spare air to burn.
A timer interrupt fired. Time to eat. Time to disengage and go be human. It was important. Some implant wearers never made it fully into dataspace. But more stayed in and starved, too overwhelmed to remember something so mundane as food. Reluctantly, she left the dataflow and went out.
The passengers filed in slowly. A mother and her nine year old son, off to visit relatives. A pair of tourists, on a mission to sample recreational chemicals. A businessman on the way to inspect his holdings. A young woman with large breasts, emigrating to a job in the sex industry. A quiet young man who moved with a dancer's fluid grace. And Lucy, withdrawn, shy around strangers. She must learn to be more outgoing, or her escape was all in vain.
The Captain gave a short non-sectarian prayer and passed the tureen. "There was a huge dataflow just now," he said. "It terminated in your cabin, Miss Starr."
"Lucy," she said. "That was just me. It's like a runner has to run to keep in shape. Well, I have to Access."
"Are you a Pilot then, Miss? I thought I knew them all."
The stew was a bit bland. She would have preferred more pepper. "Just a generalist," she said. "A Solver."
There was a communal intake of breath. Some people were trying not to look at her. Others were looking while pretending they were not. The young boy's eyes were bright. "I'll bet it hurt," he said. "When they put a computer in your brain." His mother shushed him and scolded him for bad manners.
"It's all right," Lucy said. "There's very little extra in my head at all. There's no room. Just the interface. Most of the stuff they had to put somewhere else. Which is why I'll never have the lung capacity to be a mountain climber or the stomach capacity for big-time overeating. But it's okay."
"It's unnatural," one of the chemo-tourists said.
"Pot," the graceful young man said. "Kettle. Black. You must be very brave, Miss Starr. There are times when the interface is new that are pure terror. When you stare into the face of madness."
He was Augmented. It came to her in a flash of certainty. Not like her. Implants tactical rather than strategic. Military implants. Soldier/spy/assassin. But then why expose himself, and give up the element of surprise? "I think I was more stubborn than brave," she said. "But whatever I was, it worked."
"Bill Dent," he said. "Pleased to meet you. And please do call me Bill." He dished himself more stew.
"Then you must call me Lucy."
"Often," Bill Dent said. "I plan to call you often." His smile did something to her. Something a little scary, and a little nice.
Station One was the gateway to Alternaria. It was two huge spheres lashed together by a mighty cable and rotating about each other to produce a centrifugal acceleration in lieu of gravity, without which people would soon sicken. The scent of pine resin was in the air, put there to mask the less pleasant hints of steel and oil and algal gloop. Nearly every room had plants. Not to aid the atmosphere plant, really, but because it is good for humans to be surrounded by Life. The intake interviews were going slowly. For a nearly lawless place, this part seemed oddly bureaucratic.
"Next."
She was led to a small room. This time there were no plants. An annoyed-looking official sat at a plastic table. There were no other chairs, so she must stand. An air vent produced an annoying breeze. Perhaps it was intentional.
"Lucy Starr."
"Yes."
"A Solver." He drummed his fingers on the table.
"Yes."
"I highly doubt it."
"Why?" she said. "I felt your scan. I'm sure you found the equipment."
"But not whether it is functional. Maybe you're a burnout. If so, your investment income is ample and you will be permitted to retire here."
"I assure you I am at the height of my powers. I plan to work here."
"For Peachtree Holdings?"
"No. We've parted ways. I plan to freelance."
"I think you are a spy, Miss Starr. We cannot trust Peachtree's motives, and so we cannot trust you."
But she was only trying to help. "Stop me from working," she said. "And the only winners will be the ghouls who have purchased thousands of out-of-the-money puts on your economy. Leave me be, and I will make you prosper."
The official frowned. "You will be watched," he said. "We can deport you so fast it'll make your head spin,"
The interview was over. The threat was essentially meaningless, since it would take another Solver to truly unravel her motives and they had none. Bill Dent was waiting in the hall.
"What took you?" he said.
She frowned. "More like what didn't take you. Why in Heaven's name would they give me the third degree and let a truly deadly fellow like you in without a fuss?"
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