“Well, crap.” Digging. Then more digging. He zipped through hours and days and weeks of clawing, crumbling, heating and zapping as the twentiers excavated the Sedna homestead. A couple hundred meters below the surface, they hollowed out a vast circular cavern, and in this, other bots built a centrifuge. Sedna’s gravity was minuscule, so they just pretended it didn’t have any and made rotating habitats that spun to create centrifugal weight.
Toby remembered this time, and despite the lack of human faces and voices in the images, he felt a strange sense of nostalgia. He knew that tunnel and this rocky spire outside the entrance … wait, they were outside again. The twentiers were off to prospect.
Fast-forward … more fast-forwarding … It was all stars and rocks, rocks and stars. He was just about to give up when suddenly light and sound burst on him. “Ah!” Everything was moving way too fast and he scrambled to back up the picture to where the change had happened.
At first everything was a bright blur.
Then came sound, a voice: “Is it recording?”
Toby sucked in a sharp breath.
The blur receded, sharpened, and became a face.
“Yes, this makes us no better than our enemies,” said Carter McGonigal, Toby’s father, as he scowled into the twentier’s little lenses. “But what choice do we have?
“Let’s get started.”
BOTH TOBY’S PARENTS LOOKED a little older than the last time he’d seen them. Mother, in particular, seemed careworn and tired. She was clutching a steaming coffee cup, and even though the twentier didn’t record odors, Toby felt the pungency of its scent lighting up memories—so many of them!—of times she’d sat this way on Earth, and in the habitat.
That wasn’t where they were now. His parents had lit some lamps in one corner of the vehicle bay outside the centrifuge and its meager comforts. Mother’s backdrop was a wall of tools and machinery, and they both wore mud-smeared space suits.
“It’s not just that you’re talking about spying on your own friends,” Mother said now. “It’s a slippery slope. Where’s it going to end, Carter? Isn’t this exactly how the trillionaires got to where they are? One little betrayal at a time?”
“Yeah,” said Father distractedly. He was poking at the air, obviously using an interface that probably connected to the twentier. “Same methods. Different goals.”
Toby stared at his parents, mesmerized by the little differences he could see in them. They were older—aged, for him, literally overnight. The change wasn’t so drastic as in those pictures of Peter and Evayne, and that somehow made it all more real. It was a bit like seeing pictures of them from the time before he’d been born—equally strange and unimaginable, yet obviously real.
Mother sighed. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Well. These twentiers are right at the edge of the network. They’re the bottom-feeders of the colony, which makes them perfect. If the trillionaires really have planted a mole in our group—or more than one—then we can’t trust the high-level network anymore. That’s the first thing they’re going to hack. So the Internet feeds, communications, entertainment—basically everything we use day to day in the habitats—is suspect. That’s why I want to build a secure network of our own out here. Using these guys and the other infrastructure bots.”
She knelt down to peer into the twentier’s eyes; to Toby it was disconcertingly like both his parents were examining him. “What does that get us?”
“Well, security, for one thing. If we’ve been hacked, the trillionaires could send a kill signal to some critical piece of life support and kill us all in our sleep. Then they move in and jump our claim.”
She reared back, obviously shocked. “You can’t believe they’d do that?”
“Of course they’d do that,” Toby’s father said impatiently. “In a heartbeat. Which is why we have to secure all the low-level infrastructure. Gas supplies, electricity. Heat. Hell, the circuits that open the doors. Route that stuff away from the top-level computers and into our own network.
“The second thing it gets us is spies. We can monitor them, like they’re monitoring us. Only we’ll use the most basic pieces of equipment as our bugs. Let ’em have the TVs and e-mail.”
“I see you’ve thought this through.” She frowned in thought. “How do we secure it?”
“Turing-test biocrypto. Whoever issues a command to our equipment can’t have only the right fingerprint, iris scans, or DNA. They’ll have to have it all, and the personality markers, and more.”
“So,” she said, “you, me, and who else?”
“Peter and Evayne. Nobody outside the family. We don’t know who the mole is.”
There was a momentary silence while he worked at his interface. Mother was staring at him.
“What about Toby?”
Carter McGonigal froze, then slowly looked round at his wife. “Dear … if you want. We have his metrics. But … he’s gone.”
She stood up, and her head left the frame of the picture. “He’s missing,” she said flatly. “Not the same. Not the same.”
Toby’s mother walked away quickly, leaving his father staring into empty space, an angry expression on his face. After a long motionless minute, he stood up and walked away, too—but in the opposite direction.
The twentier sat staring at the wall, and the record didn’t end until nearly a half hour later, when Toby’s father came back and switched off the bot.
THERE WERE MANY MORE records in the twentier’s data block. Toby didn’t have the heart to look at them—at least, not tonight.
Even less able to sleep than before he’d accessed the record, he lay there in bed while Orpheus grumbled and shifted next to him. He thought about how the present had so suddenly become a distant past, and grew by turns tearful, self-pitying, angry and, at last, resigned.
Here and now was where he was stuck, unless somebody had invented time travel while he’d been away. That meant he had a date tomorrow, and at the rate things were going, he was going to show up bleary-eyed and disheveled. That wouldn’t do.
“Get over yourself,” he muttered, then turned on his side and mentally pushed away the past. “Tomorrow.
“Tomorrow…”
Reciting that mantra worked, eventually. He slept.
TOBY CAUGHT ONE GLIMPSE of Kirstana’s house, but that was enough to tell him how important her family must be. She met him at her front door, wearing a combination of dark tunic and leggings, and a long dark cape whose hood was thrown back. The foyer behind her was actually a balcony at the top of a high open space; with a start he realized that the house clung to the outside of the local city sphere and was shaped like a drop of water, frozen in midtrickle down the aerostat’s curve. Spiral stairways curled down to lower balconied levels within the drop. The big curving outer wall was one continuous sheet of glasslike graphene, so transparent that it seemed not to be there at all.
“How are you?”
“I’m good.” Actually, he was. He had awoken feeling like he was doing the right things, however difficult it all was.
Kirstana had stepped through the door, and the large, hulking bot accompanying her closed it with a thump. “I hope you don’t mind if I bring Barber,” she said when she noticed Toby sizing up the bot. “After what happened the other day, my parents are giving me all kinds of grief for going out without a bodyguard.”
“Will he rip my arm off if I get too close?” Actually, Toby wasn’t intimidated by the thing; he and the other kids had grown used to having similar devices around after Peter’s kidnapping. It was remembering those days, not so long ago really, that had given him momentary pause.