“Don’t you see? It wouldn’t do any good. We can’t hide from them forever. Our only chance is to wait for Rollo.” Bogdan was already beginning to hate this Rollo character.
Although they stood on the shady side of the arcade, Annette Beijing was lit from at least three angles with a soft, warm light. Her skin pulsed with vitality, and her hair plugs sparkled. “While we wait, let me tell you everything. That way, if they get me, you can tell Rollo. Promise me that you’ll tell Rollo everything, Myr Kodiak. Promise me!”
The bees moved in for a closer look. Now Bogdan saw what was happening. He was about to be passed off to a minor character. It would take Annette a full five billable minutes or more to feed him the back story, and then she would exit the scene somehow, and he and Rollo would spend the next few hours looking for her until Bogdan ran out of credit. A clever evil scheme.
“Uh,” he said, “Annette, I’m going to have to go now.” Reluctantly, he turned away and continued up the pedway, but she followed. He walked faster, but she kept apace and pleaded with him to stay. “I can’t,” he said. “I have to go back to work.”
“To E-Pluribus, I know. You’re a very important man there. Can’t you take me with you? You can hide me there.”
“No, I can’t. E-P would never allow it.”
She tripped and fell hard to the pedway. He paused to look down at her. The knee to her jumpsuit was torn now too, and her skin scraped and bleeding. He watched in fascination as a bright trickle of red blood ran down her knee, and he felt an urgent desire to touch her, but he forced himself to look away and leave.
“Wait, Bogdan!” she called after him. “Don’t abandon me. I beg you, Bogdan, don’t throw me to the dogs!”
Though it killed him to say this to Annette Beijing, Bogdan said, “Desist.” He turned and fled up the arcade, where he saw the familiar logo of a NanoJiffy store. He ducked inside to hide from the bees that followed him. The store was much bigger than April’s stall at the charterhouse. It boasted three extruders—one dedicated to foodstuffs only—and a digester. There was even a small seating area with tables and booths. He went to the menu wall and paged through the extruder selections. Though the store was bigger than April’s, it carried the same product lines—quick extrude public domainware for the most part, stuff for the kitchen, bath, personal hygiene, plus name brands and NanoJiffy’s own, slightly more prole brand. All told, about a million products from shampoo to trombones were listed in the menu. Including phones.
Phones came in a dizzying array of forms and substances—wearable, edible, and environmental—many of which were free to the consumer. But Bogdan wanted his own phone, a phone without location or ID transponders, polling or advertising agreements, subliminal motivational messaging, remote medication metering, or membership to a suicide prevention community. In other words, Bogdan wanted a phone with no agenda outside the simple function of connecting him to the public opticom. This ruled out phone crisps, phone tattoos and nail polish, phone house plants and air fresheners, and most other models within his narrow price range. After five minutes of searching, he was about to give up when he stumbled across the new crop of cap valet felt, and he felt another pang of misery for his stolen Lisa.
Magister Scholastic Valets had come a long way since Kodiak Charter had bought him Lisa’s “Little Professor” model nineteen years before. For the same price that they had paid back then, he could purchase a “Rhodes Scholar” with seven million times the processing power and triple the Turing index. But the price! This small strip of nanofacture cost five hundred United Democracies credits! Was it possible that nineteen years ago, when he really was a ten-year-old boy, his charter had the wherewithal to invest five hundred yoodies in his education?
Bogdan sighed and scrolled to the next page where he found exactly what he was looking for—simple phone patches that you stuck to your throat and behind your ear. They were audio only, but at 00.0001 UDC, the price was right. Bogdan ordered a set and went to stand in line next to the extruder.
WORK, WORK, WORK. Bogdan’s first assignment after lunch was in a solo booth with a reclining seat. When he sat down, the booth lights dimmed, and he found himself in the pilot’s seat of a two-person Aria Ranger, ripping along at full throttle in star-encrusted space. He reached out for the controls to see if the holo was interactive, and it was! Assignments were rarely this cool. A slight touch on the navigation ball caused the ship to veer in a most pleasing way.
“Where am I?” he said, and the control panel showed him a proximity map. Evidently, he was in the solar system, not too far from Earth. He turned around in his seat and, sure enough, there was the brilliant blue planet behind him the size of a beach ball. When he turned forward again, he was startled to discover a little man in weird green and red overalls sitting in the copilot seat. He wasn’t much taller than Bogdan, himself.
“Hello, Myr Kodiak,” the man said with a lopsided grin. “Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a simulacrum of Myr Merrill Meewee, formerly a bishop of Birthplace International, and winner of the 2082 Mandela Humanitarian Award. Are you familiar with the Birthplace organization and its work?”
“Sure,” Bogdan said, “you’re the ones against people.”
The sim frowned. “Not exactly,” it said. “Birthplace is a worthy institution that tackles the important work of humanely limiting world population growth. Reproduction bans are but a small part of what they foster. While I wholeheartedly believe in Birthplace’s mission, a few years ago, I left the organization to pursue an even grander plan called the Garden Earth Project. Would you like to hear about it?”
Actually, no. Bogdan could care less about anything this wanker had to say, but he didn’t want to accidentally end his sweetest assignment in a week, so he said, “I’m listening.”
“Splendid,” said the little man. “See that bit of shiny object off your starboard bow?” Bogdan looked where the man pointed and saw not one, but thousands of shiny objects. He consulted his map and realized it was Trailing Earth, the space colony at one of Earth’s Lagrange points. “By the way,” said the man, “this live spacescape is brought to you courtesy of the SNEEN, the Starke Near Earth Eye Network. Why don’t we steer that way?”
Bogdan turned the ship toward the space colony. Immediately there was an auditory alarm, and a line on the map turned a pulsating red. “What’s happening?” he said.
The ship replied, “Warning, proximity to high-energy beam. Change course to oh-three-six. Warning.”
Bogdan didn’t know how to set a course, let alone change one, and when he turned the ship again, the alarm grew shriller.
“Hurry,” said the little man, “engage the hi-end filter.”
Without knowing what it was, Bogdan ordered the ship to engage it. The stars in his viewports darkened, and a brilliant line, like a taut wire, seemed to stretch across space. The line was too bright to look at directly, but it was dead ahead and growing larger every moment. Being able to see it made avoiding it child’s play, and Bogdan veered away. The proximity alarm fell silent.
“Good piloting!” said Bogdan’s sim passenger. “That was one of our Heliostream microwave beams that supplies Trailing Earth with power. It originates from our solar harvesters in Merc orbit and transmits an average of one terawatt per beam. It would have vaporized us.”