He gestured at a low-gee chair on the opposite side of the table. “Please take a seat,” he said, not unkindly.
I sat. The retina, I realized, was gridded out in the soothing, familiar patterns of a purchase/sales ledger and an inventory-accounting system. How unexpectedly civilized! “Um . . .” I felt my facial chromatophores flush, an autonomic response in lieu of vocal communication. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes. Ms. Alizond.” My captor leaned toward me, grinning—he could hardly do otherwise, with his sharp-toothed muzzle topped by a black olfactory bulb. “I have been looking forward to meeting you. You’ve led us a merry dance, you know. Nearly slipped through our claws twice now.” He tapped one stylus on the retina in front of him, drawing a double line beneath a column of figures: “But now we have your number! Ahahaha!”
“I beg your pardon?” I stared at him in perplexity.
“Granted.” His grin widened. “If you can tell us where she is?”
“Who?”
“Come, now! There’s no need to be coy. All you need do is tell me where your collaborator is, and we can be on our way, with no further need to detain you. Where is she?”
I shook my head. “You mean Ana?”
He nodded, tongue lolling for a moment until he remembered his manners and closed his jaws with an audible snap. “Yes. Ana Graulle-90. I believe you know of her?”
I nod. “Why do you think I’m here? She’s been missing for over a hundred days!”
“Of course.” The pirate leader’s permanent expression of feral humor belied his tone. “And you’re going to tell me where she is, aren’t you? I am very anxious to make her acquaintance.”
“I can’t help you.” I stared at the marching figures embedded in the white surface of his boardroom-sized retina: “I don’t know. I only arrived at Taj Beacon”—some quick math—“eighty-six days and fourteen hours ago. Approximately, I mean. She was supposed to have sent word of where I was to meet her: I was supposed to spend the next year collaborating with her in a course of intensive study in one of the outer belt orbitals, you know. But first she went to Shin-Tethys, then she disappeared. And I’ve got no idea where she’s gone.”
“Come now, Ms. Alizond.” The teeth reinserted themselves into his grin. “Surely your sisterhood have prearranged bolt-holes and agreed contact procedures? Scattered across such vast distances, you must know where she would expect you to rendezvous if circumstances became, ah, temporarily unfavorable to your business?”
I shuffled uneasily against my seat. “Yes, we do—but you don’t understand! She’s missing! Yes, we have preagreed rendezvous points. I’ll tell you for free, hers were in GJ 785—where I have come from—and again, in one of the high orbital kingdoms of the Trailing Pretties. She hasn’t left for GJ 785, and you can verify that: The immigration and emigration logs at the beacon are matters of public record. As for the Trailing Pretties, that’s where she ought to have gone: There is no defined rendezvous point on Shin-Tethys because she wasn’t meant to go there! I mean, it’s a planet. So massive it has its own gravity well. You can’t get away in a hurry without spending huge amounts of energy! Much less make a break for the outer system without being noticed. Why she went there—” I shrug. “That’s what I want to find out.”
I watched the pirate chief uneasily. He radiated a disturbing feral intensity, a ferocity of purpose I associated with senior executives: He was somewhat less chilly than my mother, I thought, but no less determined. “Do you have any idea who I am?” he asked.
“Not really.” I set my jaw. “Obviously you have declared yourself to be the leader of a pirate band: What else should I know?”
He whistled between his teeth, an astonishingly high-pitched noise that I could barely track. The avuncular amusement disappeared. “Ignorance is dangerous, Ms. Alizond. It can be mistaken for close-lipped cynical insight, you know. I am going to ask you again: What do you know about your sister’s current whereabouts? I ask for her own good.”
“Really?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Yes.” Was that an aggrieved glare? Or was I simply misinterpreting the facial expressions and body language of his kind? “We are not simple pirates, Ms. Alizond. We are, in point of fact, a local branch of an interstellar financial agency. And among other things, we are the underwriters of her not-insubstantial life insurance policy. Hah! You were unaware that she had such a thing? How touching. We have a distinct interest at stake in her continued existence, not to mention considerable curiosity about the nature of certain of her business activities, which have attracted the attention of a wide cross section of Dojima System’s reprobates. Observe.” Styli flashed across the retina before me, summoning up an imposingly detailed contract signed, I was reluctantly forced to concede, with what appeared to be Ana’s checksum. “We have a shared interest. What can you tell me about her?”
Pirate underwriters: what next? “She disappeared from home, which is one thing, but then she missed her first contact and her second contact. If she’s gone on the run, she’d only do that if she expected someone to come after her, someone who knew what signals she’d use, someone who had been reading her mail. It’s very upsetting. Nobody I’ve been able to contact has any idea where she is: It’s as if she’s died, or been abducted. That’s why I’m on this vehicle: It was the first available transport I could find that would take me to Shin-Tethys.” I shivered. “What do you suspect has happened?”
The pirate chief yawned. “Insurance fraud. Or worse.” Strong arms grabbed my shoulders, holding me down. “So we’re going to start by verifying that you are telling me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” he added. “Under authenticated oath, ordered this day in my capacity as a certificated independent arbiter investigating the possible fraudulent discharge of the life insurance policy of Ana Graulle-90. Sorry about this,” he added to my face with evident sincerity, then, over my shoulder: “Debug her.”
“Wait—” I began, as one of them shoved my head forward. But I was too late. A sharp tugging and a sense of emptiness at the base of my skull where a soul chip belonged was followed by a moment of icy coldness; darkness crossing my vision, static pins and needles in every extremity, a sense of extreme violation as something simultaneously sharp and blunt that smelled green and tasted of chlorine thrust into the unoccupied socket—
Hiatus.
For the most part, it is a good thing that we are no longer built from the same chaotically evolved watery lipid foam as the Fragile. Mechanocytic life is far more robust, able to operate within a far wider environmental envelope. (We may breathe an oxygenated gas mix, metabolize hydrocarbons and other feedstock, and crap processed waste, but we don’t have to do so all the time: We can run off juice, crack oxygen from water, and recycle almost everything.) But there are certain disadvantages, too. Unlike the Fragile (whose brains contain over a trillion cells), our brains are built from mere tens of millions of mechaneurons, each of them a complex device that emulates many thousands of more primitive neurons. Our brains are multiply redundant—it takes more than a simple bullet through the head to stop one of us from continuing to think, albeit at an impaired rate. And they are designed for metaprogramming, to allow their state to be copied to or from a soul chip carried in one of our two interface slots, or to allow them to be modified by an external device. Such devices have many names, names that change depending on context, from the anodyne to the malign: A remote debugger, our artificers call them when they connect them to nonsentient systems, or a slave chip, when someone stabs one into another’s thinking, feeling brain.