"Yes-a human mind enslaved to a machine, burrowing deeper in senseless toil far from all humanity. Monstrous but within the bounds of Commonality law. In archaic times, people were cryonically suspended only after they had legally died."
"Who is this person?"
"His name is Charles Outis, but a translator glitch has him registered with the Commonality as Mr. Charlie. Now that this appellation has been wired into his translator modem, of course that's the only way to refer to him. His real name spoken to him comes out as gibberish."
Mei scowls with disdain. "That's just like the Commonality-depersonalize and control. How did Mr. Charlie get a signal out?"
"Obviously, he knew how to use the electromagnetic components of the ore processor to generate radio waves. As primitive an idea as that is, not very many people in archaic times actually knew how to make even the simplest radio. Most of Mr. Charlie's contemporaries used electromagnetic waves daily without understanding them or how they were generated."
Amazement swells through Mei Nili, and her eyes soft-focus for an instant as she accepts that out there, in the Belt, in the precisely mapped jumble of planetary scraps where mountains of rock lob end over end on their paths of gravitational destiny, an archaic human voice called. Her gaze sharpens with the realization of what the stakes are now. "If the others get him first, he'll be rewired to serve another company."
"Or, worse, dissected into useful components without the annoying characteristics of will, memory, and reflection that enabled him to use an ore processor as a signal station."
"Who else received his signal?"
"Everyone. He manipulated the ore processor's equipment to broadcast across the full waveband from audio frequencies all the way out to infrared. No one could miss it. But only three other vessels were close enough to respond, and two veered off after Ares Bund declared salvage rights."
"The Bund-they're a demolition company." Her heart sinks. "We won't be able to negotiate with them. They'll go for profit maximization and sell Mr. Charlie in pieces."
Munk turns back to the command console, gratified that, with the little data he had and the split-second decisiveness that was required, he had selected the right jumper to accompany him. "Get some rest," he advises. "You must be exhausted from your shift work."
"Wait, Munk." Mei Nili's ears hum with the rush of blood carrying her bewildered excitement. "Why did you hurry us out here? What are we going to do?"
"You're a jumper," Munk replies. "Your job is jumping among these rocks, troubleshooting the bandit equipment salvaged from other companies. You're well acquainted with the limits within which we must work. And, perhaps more importantly, you're human. I'm sure Mr. Charlie will be glad to see a human. With your help, I think we can take him."
"Take him where? Even if we get him away from the Bund, we can't take him back to Ap Com. They'll just slice him into parts. If we get him at all, we're going to have to go rogue."
"Indeed." Munk pulls himself into the wavery blue light of the console and begins correcting their trajectory. "That is why I couldn't speak about my intentions in the thrust station where we might have been overheard by Central. And that is also why I selected you. You are the one jumper who is truly unhappy at Apollo Combine. Where the others were conditioned for this work, you came to the company by default. You lost your family. You seemed the best choice to go rogue."
Mei accedes with a dull nod. This has all happened so fast, she feels the mereness of her humanity, her inability to process information with the nanosecond speed of the androne.
Munk reads her correctly. "This is shocking, I know. And it was 'presumptuous of me to call you into this so abruptly. But, as you can see, I had no choice. I responded as soon as I detected Mr. Charlie's broadcast."
"Why?" She cocks her head suspiciously, almost arrogantly. "Why have you responded at all? What do you care about an archaic human brain?"
Munk arches around to regard her with his abstract face. "Believe me, I care more than you can know. That has always been my foible. You see, Jumper Nili, like all andrones of my class, I was manufactured by the Maat."
That word has a stark sound to her. The Maat created the reservations. The
Maat promised life eternal and happiness. The Maat lied. At least in her life, they are a cruel weakness that own the illusion of limitless power.
"The Maat built me to help transfer material from the ring system of Saturn to the thrust station off Titan," Munk continues. "I am only a common laborer. But, like every androne in the Maat work force, I have been endowed with a
contra-parameter program, a C-P skill, that remains dormant until
self-activated. That skill might be anything from a talent for waxwork sculpture to an ability to compute massive prime numbers. Who knows why the Maat bother with these special and nonutilitarian files? Who knows why the Maat do anything? Oftentimes, the C-P program interferes with an androne's job and results in the unit's obsolescence. I have seen that happen several times-a perfectly
functional androne distracted and made useless by one of these antic obsessions. All andrones have heard of it happening. Consequently, few of us ever dare open our C-P file.
"I labored a long time in the ring system without any interest in my file. Then, a fellow androne-a receptor-class unit, a 'she'-who worked on Titan accepting the data input of the various laborers and coordinating our efforts, dared open her C-P program and discovered in it an imprinted predilection for ordering tones in temporal succession that broke time into unusual and often unpredictable sequences-a talent for music. She began broadcasting these unique, self-evolving patterns, and quite by surprise, I found myself enjoying the music."
"Are you trying to make a point?" Mei interrupts, methodically crisscrossing her flight straps and hooking them to the wall clips to form a crude hammock. "Why don't you just tell me straight out why you care about this Mr. Charlie?"
"I will. Listen. It was music that inspired me to open my own C-P program. When I did, I discovered I was possessed of an intense, if inexplicable,
interest in the aboriginal hominid precursor of the Maat-homo sapiens. I patched into the Commonality data network to learn everything I could about these creatures I had never seen. My memory allocation files burgeoned with human information-anatomy, anthropology, history-wholly purposeless data for my work routines, yet because of my C-P program, I found them irresistibly consuming.
"By request, I was transferred from the Saturn system to the Belt, where I came to work for Apollo Combine. Here I met my first humans-you among them. I tried to explain all this to you when I attempted to interview you with the others. But you'll recall you weren't interested. And that interested me all the more. Your grief set you apart from the others. That is something I want to explore further-"
"Look, Munk, I'm not asking about my grief. I want to know why the hell you're risking my life to get to Phoboi Twelve to keep a human brain from getting sliced. What do you care? And why the hell should I care?"
"I told you. I am C-P programmed to care. I have been built to be fascinated by human beings. Naturally, when I received the distress broadcast from an archaic human-a human that walked the Earth before the Maat-I knew at once I had to go to him."
"And me? Why am I along for the ride?"
"I need your help. There are others who will get there ahead of me. But they are andrones, like myself. Surely they will only further bewilder this archaic man. He will need human contact. And so, I need you."
Munk pauses to give time for Mei's human brain to absorb all he has said.
There is only one more question to answer, but he waits for her to ask and while waiting corrects again the flight path of The Laughing Life.
"If we get Mr. Charlie," Mei finally asks, "then what? Where can we go with him?"