May 2009 Archives

Crow messaged the sender back: prior appt, roland park 4pm. An affirmative came back a moment later as Crow made his way down the stairs to the first floor disaster area. He wondered if a hired maid would clean this stuff up, but forgot about it as his mind moved on to other things. Hunger rumbled in his belly, but there wasn't time to make it to a restaurant and the kitchen was hazardous to mammalian life. "It's a baseball game, so there's got to be hot dogs, right?" He muttered to himself. "Even if it is little league."

He arrived at the field and weaved between sentis guiding kids along the footpaths and parents arriving in SUVs. A few kids piled out of the cars with the spare parent of the day, but most had electronic escorts instead. Five years ago they tried to burn down Russia, how soon we forget when the convenient thing to do is just keep doing things the same way we always have.

Crow spotted Alexander awkwardly arrayed in the three-quarter length t-shirt that passed as a jersey and a net-backed baseball cap with a tiger stitched onto the front. Alexander was trying to tie his cleats with Nan's assistance, but it required a shade more dexterity than the average six year old could manage. Nan finished the job as Alexander straightened and plunged an ear into the depths of his ear to scratch. He spotted Crow and flashed a toothy grin and waved with his entire arm, almost clocking the coach in the groin as he did so. Crow smiled and waved back.

The concession stand stood behind the backstop, an ugly thing of cheap wood cobbled together by some volunteers a few years back and painted a blue of vulgar brightness that had faded bit by merciful bit in the summer suns and winter rains since then. Crow fumbled out his wallet and was disproportionately pleased at the five dollars he found there. Just enough for a couple dogs and a soda, but then starvation was no laughing matter. Crow juggled the bottle of Mountain Dew and the paper plate wrapped around a pair of supermarket hot dogs microwaved and stuffed into buns that still were half frozen. He coated them with oceanic quantities of ketchup and relish and managed to balance them long enough to climb into the top row of the stilted structure the volunteers had passed off as bleachers.

The first kid tottered up to the plate and swung and missed at the ball sitting on top of the tee. Alexander had received a tee for Christmas the year before and had solemnly practiced when he remembered since he had dreams of being shortstop for the Giants when he grew up.

"Who you got money on?" A voice with a Russian accent asked from his right. Crow jumped in surprise, almost dropping the hot dog halfway between plate and mouth. A skinny guy with a hard and angular Slavic face sat next to him on the splintering bench in a spot that had been empty in the last moment. A surface of stubble shadowed his shaved head, skin a pallid shade of olive. He wore expensive looking clothes that had actually been tailored to fit. Crow eschewed the look himself, but had enough exposure to the expensive tastes of the technorati to recognize the subtle shift in cut and balance of the clothes. They did not hang, they fit. Crow had always been the sort of executive who showed up in jeans half the time and refused to tuck in a shirt or wear a tie.

"The short ones." Crow said. "Always watch out for the little guy."

The Russian laughed a low chuckle, gravel grinding on asphalt. "I'm Yuri Hydane. Overhauser wanted me to pull you aside."

Chapter Five - A Burning Bridge

"Fired?" Crow broke into laughter that was at once disbelieving, humored and desperate. "Built the company on my motherfucking back and this is what I get?"

He had woken briefly to throw his alarm clock across the room when it went off at its appointed 7:59 time to get him out of bed for work. Not eight o'clock even, that was bad luck. Work started at 8:30 sharp, and fifteen minutes to roll into wrinkled clothes and fifteen minutes to drive were all he needed, with a minute or two of snatched time once there to grab the sweet ecstasy of black coffee - sugar and milk were for the kids weaning themselves off of soda to the adult source of caffeine. Somebody should figure out how to make carbonated coffee, the combination of two such forces might just be the marketing equivalent of Hiroshima. In any case, the alarm clock ceased sleep disruption as it disintegrated into cheap Vietnamese parts all over piles of clothes by the closet.

Dreamless sleep took Crow until the afternoon sun reached the windows on his bedroom's side of the house and woke him the natural way. "This is the way man is meant to wake." Crow informed the mortal remains of his clock on the way to the bathroom. "We use alarm clocks to imitate the cry of a predator - the only thing we are hardwired genetically to wake up for on a dime."

He had of course checked his email next from the laptop in his office across the hall. Email was as much part of the morning ritual as clearing the bladder and drinking coffee. Filters took out ninety-nine percent of the messages immediately, leaving a few dozen for him to actually deal with. Half of these Crow filed away after half a glance at their contents. One was from Human Resources and dropped the electronic pink slip on him. Crow called in immediately after the laughter subsided and faded into swearing.

"Crow, it's gotten too much." O'Malley explained. "You're late half the time and when you are here you don't work. You're dragging the entire division down with you. I think everyone deserves second chances, but you've had chance after chance with us."

"That place is mine as much as yours. I'm the one who made it what it is." Crow said.

"Crow." O'Malley insisted. "You've made this choice, not us. We want this to be on as amiable terms as possible. You've meant a great deal to this company, and it'll be hard to get on without you, but we just feel this is the best way to go. We'd love to keep you on as a consultant of some sort, to cover all the bases while a transition is made. We'll send a contract over later."

Crow wanted to scream at the old bastard, really rip him a new one, but some bit of sanity left over from better days remained. Never burn bridges. They always said that. You never knew when you'd have to go groveling back to someone. He verbally smiled and nodded his way through the rest of the conversation. When O'Malley hung up, Crow threw the silver Nokia down the hallway so it ricocheted down the stairs with an improbable bounce off of the ceiling.

He retrieved the phone and called the number on the business card from last night.

"Da Vinci Law. How may I direct your call?" A pleasant voice answered.

"John Osteryoung, please."

The call went straight to voicemail, on which Crow left a brief message. He showered and shaved in an imitation of getting ready for work, though it was almost three o'clock by now. His phone beeped at him as he swung down the stairs. A text message - juniors pub, 4th and community, 4pm. Crow grimaced at his watch. It would be tight. Shit. He couldn't even make that. Alexander had a little league game then that he was supposed to attend. Times like this he really missed Trinan, and it was a guilty feeling, since he wanted her here so that someone could cover Alexander's game and leave him free.

A month after Susannah left, Garet realized that he missed the companionship more than he missed the sex, so he stopped saving up for the escort service and went down to the pound to get a dog. He had never owned a dog and so was a bit mystified by the entire process. He walked right up to the desk of the run down animal shelter in the middle of town and asked how to buy a dog. The clerk stared at him with blank eyes that only betrayed life by glistening in the too-white fluorescents.

"Dogs are shelved on the right, cats on the left." The clerk said. Garet didn't thank it. It was a cheap model with skin hardly a step above the junk they used to mold into Barbie dolls. Good enough to fool the tourists in the first generation, but mostly just good for giving people the creeps these days. People got sick of the almost human mannerisms and an appearance that resembled a zombie more than machine or man.

Garet wandered down the aisle, glancing with dull interest at the boxed animals. A few older varieties did not move, their power cells worn down to the point of needing replacement. Newer ones pawed at their plastic wrappers, realistic down to hair and claw. Some of the dogs even barked, although Garet wondered why they would program that in if the entire point was to package the pluses of an animal without the flaws. That creepy feeling oozed out from every box at Garet though, that sense of artificiality lurking right underneath the surface. He amended the thought. The problem was not that he felt the artificiality peeking through; it was that he could tell it was being faked. The cats did not arch their backs because that was a feline instinct, but because that was what they were supposed to do.

He held a hand up to a particular cat container, this one filled with a half dozen kittens of varying neon colors. Some people went for the utterly unnatural animals. One of these even looked like it had plaid fur. Garet shrugged. At least it was more honest.

A screech ripped out of a closed door at the end of the aisle, although none of the animals so much as lifted a head, except for a couple of guard dog models. It echoed again like a dying tiger. Garet strode to the door but found it both unmarked and locked. He jogged down the aisle to the front desk to confront the clerk again.

"What's in the back?" Garet asked.

"Biologicals." The clerk said.

"Why aren't they out with the others?"

"Too much of a mess. No one adopts them anyway, so it saves time to keep them back there. No clean-up, and we just drop the whole cage right in the incinerator." The clerk explained.

"Well I want to see one." Garet said. It was exactly the kind of idiot impulse that had driven Susannah out of the house, but he didn't care. I can live with my own personality being fucked up. It's part of my extensive charm to myself.

The clerk nodded and left the desk, pacing down the hall with a rolling gait that tilted from side to side. It unlocked the door with a swipe of a magnetic card that appeared to be embedded somehow in the pseudoskin of its left hand. "Very well, sir." It seemed that the clerk had a bit of English butler programming.

The room had the appearance of chaos straining on a slipping leash. Plastic cages towered in stacks ten high, their occupants wailing for freedom. Each cage hooked into a trio of tubes to carry in food and water and return waste. Some animals stared with the eyes of the hopeless, not even lifting their heads to glance at the new arrivals, but most hurled themselves about with manic intensity. One cat at the very top of the nearest stack smashed against the plastic hard enough to pull the supply tubes taut. He was a beautiful gray cat, almost silver, who glared at Garet with a slash of blue eyes before returning to the violence against his captivity.

"Why are there so many of them?" Garet asked.

The clerk seemed to want to leave with as much emotion as its limited programming and facial muscles could manage to convey. "An old city ordinance prohibits the euthanasia of biologicals until they have been contained for at least two weeks. They build up after a while. Did you know that they breed by themselves, sir? It is quite unseemly."

"Well, that's how humans used to do it." Garet said.

A smile so joyful that it actually looked real crossed the clerk's face. "That's just an urban legend. Did you see a dog that you liked?" The clerk gestured back towards the aisle of artificial animals.

Garet's eyes drew up to the particularly psychotic cat. By now, it had fully loosened the tubing and with a final jolt the cage tumbled down out of the air end over end. Garet caught it before he realized what his arms were doing and he felt the poor bastard clonk up against the top of the cage and then against the bottom once more. The ones in the aisle would just keep bouncing like those little superballs you could buy for a dollar out of slots inside the drug store.

For a moment, Garet's eyes met the demon inside an impervious plastic ball of life support. A lazy slash headed for Garet's eyes, but clattered impotently against the inside of the cage, so resistant that it refused to even scratch. "I'll take this one." He declared to the clerk.

"But that's not a dog." The clerk said in confusion. It studied the animal. "I believe it may be a feline." Another pause. "And it's a biological. Are you aware of the health risks of owning a biological organism?"

"I'd imagine it's much like having a child." Garet said.

"Do you have children?" The clerk asked.

"No." Garet said.

"Oh." The clerk said and fumbled through a few electrons for another thought. "I don't recommend it. They smell and mature into even larger biologicals."

"I'll keep that in mind." Garet said idly. He was staring at the cat, watching it lick itself clean of the litter and food residue that had splashed around with the fall. Well it bathes better than I do, though that can't taste very good.

Garet took the cat home in his boxy old hybrid Toyota from the turn of the century. The gasoline was a collector's commodity now and cost more per gallon than decent wine. Puttering around a godforsaken town of forty thousand in the middle of Iowa allowed Garet to stretch the fuel for quite a while though. Humboldt was nothing if not compact. Cash was far enough in between that there was not much to do about getting a new one. If the batteries needed replaced again, he would have to learn how to ride a bike.

"It's just like riding a bike." Garet told the cat when he stopped at a light. "Did you know everybody used to learn how to ride a bike when they were a kid? I've only even seen a bike once or twice." The cat's glare was the only sign of life. Garet poked his finger through the rubber flap left for petting. "You okay?" With his luck, the damn thing would die before he even got it home. He wondered if it had come with a warranty. The small print of the license agreement had been at least thirty pages. Maybe he should have asked about it before affixing his thumb print to it. He looked back to the road as the light turned green.

Pain stabbed through his finger and almost drove Garet right off the road into one of the ubiquitous Midwest ditches. He sucked on the tip and tasted dusky blood. Skin flapped out over his fingernail where a claw had slipped halfway down to the bone. "Son of a bitch." The cat remained on its back, glaring at him.

Garet kept all limbs well clear of the cage while he drove, sucking on his finger occasionally. It itched more than anything now. The outskirts of Humboldt were a half mile from the town center, and Garet lived in a ramshackle house built sometime in the last century. It hovered on the edge of a gully that ran between two low hills and contained a pittance of a stream that eventually evaporated or made it down to the Des Moines River, which ran through the middle of town.

"See that, cat?" Garet pointed at the gully and its hidden trickle. "That's my yacht club."

Garet pulled off of the two lane county highway and coasted down a short gravel road that served as a driveway. The houses of his neighbors straddled the two hills that framed his gully. They were a sight newer than his sagging wreck, and better kept up. The yuppies could probably afford bots to do the upkeep and grounds keeping. Garet's upkeep consisted of him chopping back the weeds with a machete when he was drunk. The car lurched leftwards from a hole that he should have noticed sooner. Please don't let the bumper fall off again. I'm out of duct tape.

The parking brake engaged with a groan and Garet got out with a sigh. His worst fear was not that it would break down, that was inevitable, but that it would break down somewhere besides here. He could afford neither a tow truck or the impound fees for vehicle abandonment. Garet pulled open the passenger door and sighed when the latch stuck and the plastic handle twisted like taffy off of its bolt. He dropped the handle to the ground and went around to lug the cage across the seat. Garet's face pressed against the plastic door as he did so, and the cat was kind enough to slash and hiss at him through the plastic.

"Ya know, you could really show some gratitude since you were a day or two from the county incinerator." Garet groused at the cat.

He dropped the cage in the middle of the living room and grimaced at the yowl from within. Forgetting he's in there is not a good way to get on his good side.

Garet's robotic cat entered the room, fake purring as it did so. The thing bugged him so badly that he had not bothered to name it. At the same time though, he could not bring himself to just throw it away. It had been top of the line at one point, twenty-odd years ago when someone had gotten it for Christmas or a birthday. It was now eighth hand at least, but you could still see the quality, despite the age and failing parts. It was a shame that his car was not half as well bred.

It arched its back and marched in front of the cage, soft metallic skin rippling in the light of the sunset filtering through the back windows. The texture of the thing always reminded Garet of really smooth aluminum foil. It poked at the cage with one paw, testing to see if the almost transparent barrier was really there. The cat inside launched itself so hard against the plastic that the cage almost tipped over on top of the facsimile cat. Garet could not help laughing until he noticed that the cat still had its fur on end from head to toe. It was deathly afraid, and as pissed off as a twice cheated-on wife.

Garet picked up the robotic cat and set it delicately in the spare bedroom and shut the door. No sense making the new cat upset over a pile of bolts. He opened the cage and then sat on the couch, bottom sagging through almost to the floor, as he watched and waited for the cat to come out and explore its new home.

It did not cooperate. Six hours, a delivery pizza, and a lot of SportsCenter later, Garet gave up on the cat and went to bed. He hesitated at the door to the bedroom for a moment and then allowed it to stay open a crack.

Since he was a kid, Garet had feared open doors while he slept. If even a crack remained, he lay breathless and stared at the tiny gap of contrasting darkness. All nightmares derived from that cleave in the wall. It had begun on his sixth birthday, when he went to sleep after watching old monster movies at the only birthday party he'd ever had. His mother had spent hours concocting a pyramidal cake to indulge his ancient Egyptian phase. In a whiskey drenched clown costume, Garet's father had spilled across the cake and collapsed the card table in a cloud of booze. Garet found himself staring at the partly open door that night, vowing to stay awake until midnight to get every last second out of the worst birthday ever. The last time he remembered wavering in red digits against the corner of his eye was 10:53, but he woke screaming at two in the morning and never slept with the door open again.

A psychologist would probably suggest repressed memories and proscribe Prozac and hypnotherapy. Garet just knew that there was a horror lurking in cracked doorways. It let the monsters in. Once his mother suggested in a fit of misguided rationality that the monsters could just as easily come in through his bedroom window, cracked open for the faint summer breeze. "The monsters are inside." Garet had told her. He did not understand until years later how he knew that or why his mother's face went gray.

So Garet stared at the cracked door, unable to sleep. He slipped into a sort of trance between sleep and wake that was neither comforting nor restful. A screech and a crash snapped him to full consciousness around one o'clock in the morning. Garet froze for a moment of juvenile terror and then tumbled towards the door.

Debris tangled up in his feet, upending Garet over the shattered remains of his robotic cat, its limbs busted and soft belly torn open. Legs twitched at the air with mindless determination, reminding Garet of a potato bug trying to roll off its back. The new cat sat five feet away in the moonlight, licking itself. It paused now and then to stare at Garet with cool green eyes.

"Well that wasn't nice." Garet said in attempted humor that fell flat. The cat stretched and padded out of the moonlight to the darkness of the living room. Garet felt for the power supply of the robotic cat and pulled it loose to stop the zombie-like dance of its legs.

A rustling sound came from the living room, and then a low mutter like an engine choking in the distance. Garet moved through the house on tiptoes, trying to avoid noise and the lunatic cat somewhere ahead. The curtains on the sliding glass door moved in the moonlight, generating the rub of fabric on fabric. The shadow of the cat passed along the bottom of the door. It issued an urgent meow his direction.

Garet heard the second sound again and pulled aside the curtain's edge to peak at his dismal yard. The moonlight lent a ghastly transparency to everything outside, as if a film projector were casting images across the dark and desultory background.

A woman sat on a pile of tires in the middle of the yard, wearing blue pajamas of the institutional variety. Her hands cupped her face and her shoulders shook in deep sobs. Garet pulled open the sliding glass door to call out to her, but the cat darted out and instead he hissed "Hey you!" at the escaping animal. Garet's fingers slipped through the silky fur without finding a grip.

The woman jumped at his voice, obviously thinking that she was the target of the reprimand. She slipped down off of the tires and into the full glare of the moonlight, which glistened on her tear-stained cheeks. Garet thought she would burst again into tears the way she froze at the sight of the cat stalking towards her.

Instead she stared at the cat in fascination as it circled her legs, purring and rubbing. Garet didn't see the need for a big fuss over a lousy cat. He cleared his throat to get her attention.

"Excuse me, ma'am." He said, feeling like an idiot. "Are you lost or something?"

The woman nodded and reached to pet the cat.

"Are you from around here?" Garet asked.

"In a way." She said. The cat purred like a buzz saw as she knelt and rubbed the back of its neck.

"You know anyone around here?"

"They're all dead." The woman said.

"That's not good." Garet said. He had visions of a car wreck and this woman stumbling away into the boonies dazed with a concussion to land on his doorstep.

The woman shrugged. "I'm okay with it."

That gave Garet pause. "What's your name?"

"Cassie."

"Why don't you come on inside?" Garet said. "We'll get you something to eat or call the police."

Cassie looked at Garet and he felt his insides melt. She was beautiful, her face sculpted out of soft white marble by the hands of an artist. Short black hair spiked all over the place in a muss of tangles and cowlicks. Her eyes glowed in the dark like the cat's. She smiled and tilted her head.

The cat hissed suddenly, as if picking up the scent of a predator. It slashed at Cassie's arm but missed. Garet could not believe she had moved so quickly out of the way. She lashed out at the cat, but it managed to skirt under her fingertips and disappear into the darkness. For a moment, Garet thought he could see its eyes flashing back at the house, but they flickered out into the shadows. He shrugged at her.

"Just got him from the pound today." Garet said.

"Maybe he thought an earthquake was coming." Cassie said. "They say animals are sensitive to those sorts of things."

"Yeah, I guess they do. Dogs howling before the city tumbles down and all." Garet said.

Cassie laughed but there was no sound of humor underneath it. "That's because they have souls. That's how life touches the great beyond."

"That so?" Garet asked in a mumble. Something about the woman felt wrong to him. She was gorgeous, sure, but there was something off about her. No smell, for one. That was a little thing, pheromones or something, but women always had a scent to them. Maybe men did too, but Garet wasn't wired that way.

He led her into the house and flipped on the living room lights. Before the light drowned out the night, he thought he caught a glimpse of the cat perched on a pile of rocks, but the darkness was too dense to tell. Shadows from the trees kept the center of the yard in stark contrast to the blaring moonlight.

In the kitchen, Garet put on some coffee as Cassie seated herself at the used dining room table, scarred from a half-century of misuse before Garet had picked it up for five bucks at a garage sale. None of the chairs matched except the one that she picked. In the harsh fluorescents her skin almost glowed. Garet wondered if she'd had some of those new injections that made your skin shine like glow-in-the-dark plastic. He discounted the thought; the effect was too subtle for that. He placed a steaming cup in front of her, scalding himself on the handle.

"Sorry, I don't have any milk or sugar." Garet apologized. Cassie picked up the cup around the base - not the handle - and lifted it to her lips. "Hey wait!" Garet yelped. "That'll burn!"

Cassie raised an eyebrow and then tilted the cup back and drained it in a couple of gulps. Remnants of steam leaked from the corners of her mouth as she spoke. "I have tough skin."

"And then." Garet said. He looked down at the other cup he had set down for himself and pushed it away down the table. He sat down across from her and leaned in. "Is there someone you should be calling or something?" He asked. "The police? Family? Boyfriend?"

"I am alone." Cassie declared. Her eyebrows came together. "Are you?"

"Oh, am I ever." Garet said. He tossed his head towards the back door. "That cat was the last thing I had left, and he was new."

"That makes this a bit easier, then." Cassie said. She swept her palm out from her chest and threw the empty coffee mug at Garet's forehead like a shot put. He had only a moment of blurring vision to be stunned before he lost consciousness.

Garet awoke with his entire body feeling warm and fuzzy. He blinked a couple of times and noticed that even his eyelids felt like they had fallen asleep. Everything around him moved in slow motion. An odd pressure in his wrists manifested into a stomach turning realization that he was strapped to the wall with a pair of belts. Garet lolled his head backwards and saw that each had been pounded into the wall with a half dozen or so nails. His legs refused to move at all.

Cassie materialized out of the darkness and gave a little wave like a mom reassuring a toddler she was still there from across the yard. "The Demerol should be kicking in now." She said.

Garet tried to nod, but his head just jerked a couple of times. "What are you doing?" The words came off his tongue as one long syllable, but she seemed to understand, and the question was immaterial since he guessed that she wasn't tying him up and drugging him to play checkers.

"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to kill you." Cassie explained in a matter of fact tone.

"That's usually not until the second date." Garet insisted, his voice breaking as if he was thirteen again. The argument had made sense in his head, but the expanding wad of cotton that seemed to be pressing on his brain made it a bit hard to think.

Cassie picked up a remote control and flipped on the television mounted to the wall that Garet faced. It was a cheap little half-wall model that he had picked up used, but it did the job. Cassie changed channels a couple of times until it landed on a late night evangelical station.

"My understanding is that humans spend most of their time watching television, so this should keep you occupied." Cassie said.

Garet moaned as a faith healer praised the lord at the top of his lungs in a suit that cost more than Garet's mortgage. Personally, I blame that damned cat. No reason. It just felt good to arbitrarily blame something.

Something in what Cassie said tugged at Garet's mind until she turned a step to the left and her blue pajamas snapped into focus. The label on the sleeve read Algona Institution of Robotic Mental Health. That explained a whole lot that he'd felt better not knowing.

"Why?" Garet managed.

"I need a soul." Cassie explained. "That is what makes you and I different. Humans have souls. If I could just have a soul too, I would be complete." She paused and drew a butcher knife out from behind her back. "Some ancient peoples thought it was in the liver."

Garet's eyes went wide and he yanked at the belts with all of his strength, but the Demerol had done its job too well. "Let me go you crazy bitch!" He shouted. It occurred to him that calling someone from a mental institution crazy might be unwise.

"I'm not crazy!" Cassie screamed. "I'm just incomplete!" The knife waved in the air, glinting from the television's light. "It's not my fault that they built me without a soul. I'm just trying to fix their mistake."

Over her shoulder, the preacher belted into another cascade of hallelujahs and amens. "Well at least change the channel." Garet pleaded. "The three-am SportsCenter should be on."

Cassie looked over her shoulder and blinked. She turned back to him. "But this is religion. Humans need religion for their souls."

"Honey, this ain't my religion."

"Then you don't have a soul?" Cassie wondered. She took a step back and a blur of fur and claws hit her mid chest, flying in from the window like a hairball from hell. Cassie hollered and ripped at the cat, managing to throw it across the room where it landed neatly on all fours and stalked back towards her, back arched and hair prickling on end. Rivulets of blood trickled off of her cheeks and out of the slashes lining her arms.

"Blood?" Garet asked.

"It can't be." Cassie sputtered. "No, no it's all a trick." She looked around and her eyes locked on the cat. She screamed and ran out of the room, the front door slammed open seconds later and Garet was left alone in the house with his cat.

The police came by the next afternoon when Garet's neighbors called to report that his front door had been open all day and that there had been screaming the night before. Hungry, exhausted, his arms aching from hanging for twelve hours, and his sanity tested by the endless droning of the evangelical network, Garet could hardly thank them enough when they cut him down. He explained as best he could what had happened, his eyes darting now and then back to the cat, who lounged atop a seven foot bookshelf in the corner, only pausing from its grooming to glare down at the intruding officers.

The sergeant laughed when Garet finished his tale. "Yeah we caught that one last night wandering down the middle of the freeway."

"Is she really from an institution?" Garet asked.

"Naw." The sergeant said. "She'll be going to one now, but she just made that get-up herself from stolen prison laundry." The sergeant leaned in and raised an eyebrow at Garet. "Say, you didn't really believe she was a robot, did you?" He chuckled. "Son, we melt down robots that go crazy, we don't put them in a hospital."

As the police left, Garet glanced up and saw the cat staring at him again. It yawned at him like a lion at midday on the Serengeti. At the back of its gaping throat, hardly more than a twinkle, Garet saw the flash of metal, where deep inside, artificial tissue had not been laid over the circuitry.

"My grandpa was a taxi driver, but that entire industry is gone now." He paused and inhaled a deep draft of nicotine. "My dad never understood it, he went the college route, became an engineer, designed computer chips that they stamped out in billion dollar factories in two dollar East Asian shit holes. He said grandpa was too smart to just be a cab driver." Crow smiled. "'Just' always preceded cab driver in dad's lexicon. The thing was, grandpa liked his job. He liked picking people up, driving around all day, talking to all the people coming through the city. He had a bead on the heartbeat of the world that way. My dad hated him just a little for it, I think because he hated his own job so much underneath. There was this sense of unfairness to dad, sort of like he was exasperated because he had done everything right - college, family, successful career- but it still wasn't the right combo to make him happy. Grandpa never had that. He was happy. Dad resented that. I always did a bit too. But I resent more that I can't be a cab driver now, even if I wanted to."

"Industries disappear as new ones develop, it's part of progress." Rebecca said.

"Yeah, that's used to dismiss the concerns, but we rarely question whether the progress is worth having in the first place."

"And ice-delivery men lost their jobs when refrigerators were invented." Rebecca said. "Would you give up refrigerators so that your great-grandpappy could keep lugging two-hundred pound blocks of ice on his back from door to door?"

"The ice-delivery men were replaced in their own way by refrigerator repair men, by refrigerator sales people, by all the people of the new industry. What's happening today is entirely different. It is not an industry being replaced by another industry, it is humans being replaced wholesale by machines." Crow said.

"Look, we put machines in the low-level jobs, so that people can be reserved for the important jobs, for the thinking jobs." Rebecca said.

"That argument worked until the advent of sentience." Crow said. "At that point machines could take the thinking jobs too. We have been rendered obsolete by our own creations."

"Even taken to that extreme, which I do not concede, we are left with utopia." Rebecca said. "We are left with the machines doing the work, and humanity can en masse engage in art, literature, everything that we have always wanted to have instead of endless labor. We have the leisure and freedom to do whatever we want."

"Fuck leisure!" Crow snarled. "Perfect freedom is indistinguishable from slavery. Without labor, without suffering, there is no art or literature. We are defined by our struggle and so if we remove that struggle, we are left with nothing. As a species we would become doddering geriatrics stumbling between our bingo games and our televisions, always waiting for our grandchildren to come visit, bring us new board games, deliver our food, wipe our asses, tell us stories of their vicarious lives. Our own living would be over. And more, in our senility we do not wonder, if the sentis have no capacity for love, then why would they bother keeping the old folks around? In our short-sighted laziness, we have signed our own death warrant."

"You sound like a Naturalist." Rebecca said.

Crow tossed his cigarette into the street. "I'm not a Naturalist. I'm not anything that ends with 'ist'. I prefer to think of myself as a free thinker. I don't need a political party or special interest affiliation to make up my own mind. I design sentient minds for a living and hate the principle of them in my own mind. I am a contradiction, because that is what life itself is." Crow began to walk down the street away from her, feeling the heat of alcohol simmering his brain. "Thank you for the company, I think I'll find my way home now."

He walked then, until his legs ached and his mind sobered up. It was almost dawn when he trudged with triumphant weariness into his home. A glance into Alexander's room verified all was in order and a brief set of orders got Nan set to get the boy ready for school in the morning, now only an hour or two away. Crow collapsed into darkness.

 

 

The old guy left and so did Crow after a decent interval, finishing a beer to provide an edge of clarity. He didn't go home yet, his soul itching a bit too much for that. The towering façade of International Robotics soared into the sky above his head. Buildings in the Silicon Valley just didn't go that high as a rule, so it stood out like a monolith among the endless two to three story business districts. There were earthquakes, sure, but mostly it was because there was enough room around to grow into that skyscrapers were considered unnecessary. Like the revolution they brought about. Crow thought, eyes trailing up the almost gothic lines and protrusions decorating the outside of the building. It looked tacky, a fact reinforced by the architectural awards showered on the design firm. The same guys had won the first entry for the World Trade Center replacement a quarter century ago, applauded by fellow architects (at least the ones not in sniping mode) and then soundly rejected by a tide of public opinion. It just wasn't the kind of gaudiness that appealed to a gilded public - it didn't have tits or explosions.

Cars poured out of the underground parking, driven out each and every one by personal robots, while the owners thumbed through magazines or stared dumbly out on the scenery from the backseat. His eyes squinted in turn as the headlights came up the drive and intercepted his pupils.

A cigarette appeared in hands addicted to the point of automation and his lips gripped the slight texture of the paper. He wormed through the international smoker's dance, checking every pocket and cranny on his person for a lighter. A muttered obscenity trickled out from the sides of the cancer stick.

"Need a light?" Rebecca asked. Back again, but eyes still flashing with embers of anger. She held out a polished stainless steel Zippo and flicked it open with a practiced move. With her second arm, he noticed, the new one.

Crow moved in and sucked the flame in to get the cigarette going. For a moment the vision of her plunging the lighter into his eye socket, flame and all, occurred to him, but a fix was worth the risk. Motto of all sorts of junkies. He thought.

Crow thanked her. "What brings you back my way?"

"A question." Rebecca said, she puffed at a smoke of her own and glanced out on the street, following his eyes to find the item of interest.

"Forty-two." Crow said.

"Don't be clichéd." Rebecca said, but her mind was elsewhere, the words didn't zing past his ears like near-miss bullets.

"I'll try to restrain my triteness for your progressive ears." Crow smarmed.

Rebecca folded her arms over her chest, but it took an extra split-second, a formerly unconscious gesture that new arms had to relearn. "Why? That's all. Why would a keystone of all these wonderful inventions turn against them?"

Crow gestured to the cars still leaving International Cybernetics with his cigarette. "Every one of those cars is driven by a senti."

"So?" Rebecca asked.

"So, if it weren't for the sentis, some of those people would be tired from the day and not want to drive. Or maybe they would not own a car at all. Some would be half drunk from afternoon margaritas with clients and not be able to drive home themselves anyway. In any case, some of them would call a taxi, take a cab home instead." Crow said.

"Hardly ever." Crow said. "It's been at least a week or two."

The man tapped out a cigarette from a pack he pulled from inside the coat jacket. Marlboros. The red box with extra cancer warnings.

"I don't think you can smoke in here." Crow said.

"I'm rich." The man said and shrugged. He lit the cigarette with a match that he flicked against his thumbnail. "It opens some doors and closes others."

"You have me at a disadvantage." Crow said, prompting.

The man shook the match out and dropped it into container that held the sugar and cream packets at the edge of the table. "I find that is usually the case." He cleared his throat. "I came to your office today to have a chat with you, but was told that you had made an unscheduled detour for the afternoon. We've had feelers out to you for some time, but did not think to find the situation I found here."

"Me on the floor?" Crow rubbed his head and wondered if the bruises or the hangover would feel worse tomorrow.

"No." The man said. "That would not have been terribly unexpected given the biography we have on you, in all honesty. I refer to your timely interruption of a public relations attempt."

"Ah. You know what all that was about?"

"Yes. But I'd like to hear why you intervened." The man said.

Crow shrugged. "It was a setup. That weasly guy in the bar was getting it on tape and the robot and the guy that tripped were in on it. It was like they were reading off a script."

The man nodded but said nothing. He made Crow nervous, like one of those teachers in junior high who asks a question and just keeps staring at you until the entire satisfactory answer has been wrung out of your brain. Crow continued, if only to look down to avoid the stare.

"I just hate anything so blatantly fake." Crow said.

"As do I, Dr. Daedalus, as do I." The man took a business card from his pocket and handed it to Crow. "Look at it later, and give me a call once you've thought over the offer and its repercussions. I represent an interest that stands contrary to the robotics industry and especially the push towards artificial intelligence."

"You're Naturalists?" Crow asked. He thought of Father Thomas.

The man smiled. "We are the originators of the movement, though it is no longer in ours or anyone's hands. We like things decentralized in that sense. Compartmentalized.

"You are a more valuable asset than you recognize, Dr. Daedalus." The man said. "We recognize that you are dissatisfied with your job, well, your life to be more general. We understand the feeling that there ought to be a higher purpose to which one may strive. We aim to provide that purpose for those willing to take it."

"Sounds like a cult." Crow said.

The man smiled, puffing a bit of smoke in Crow's general direction. "Think of it as nothing more than a job offer if you'd like. A job with goals more akin to your personal body of ethics than your current position offers."

The robot stopped abruptly and the top keg rolled off, thudding to the floor and rolling with uneven sloshing. It collided with a gorilla-chested fellow and tripped him up, causing a domino clatter of falling barstools and beer-guts as the victim flailed to stay upright and crashed down amongst his fellow drinkers.

Robertson rushed out from behind the bar and glared at the senti. "Look here. I said everything goes around back since you pulled this crap last week. I want you out of here now."

"Sir, the rear entrance is not rated for organic life." The senti said in a reasonable voice that sounded in every way like a real human. "So I must deliver through the front entrance."

"You're not organic, you metal shit pile." The tripped man snarled. "Go through the back like a good toaster."

The senti looked genuinely hurt. "The back entrance emits superheated steam." The senti protested. "I could not enter that way without damaging my face."

"I'll damage your face then so it doesn't matter what entrance you come through!" The tripped man snarled and took a threatening step forward. The senti did not move, but the entire situation felt somehow wrong to Crow. It was contrived, faked somehow. The beats were too shallow between response and retort, argument and insult. The language sounded practiced. He stood without realizing what he was doing as the argument commenced down predictable lines. A man caught his eye moving between barstools a few feet away, hand holding a phone at the perfect distance to keep the exchange in good focus. A scruffy guy, the sort with wild eyes that never seemed to focus quite right, he looked familiar to Crow.

Crow closed the distance between the senti and the man it had tripped. Crow rummaged in his pocket and found a pocket screwdriver that would do nicely. He palmed it and pulled it out as he took the last few steps towards them. The tripped man's eyes flicked up and over the senti's shoulder, and glinted with confusion. He coughed and stumbled over his next line. Crow inserted the screwdriver into an almost invisible slot underneath the senti's left shoulder and rotated it clockwise with a deft and practiced motion. The senti stopped talking mid-sentence and the tripped man's mouth opened and closed a couple of times.

"What's the matter?" Crow asked. "The hundred bucks they gave you not cover improv?"

The tripped man thought for a moment and then laid Crow out on the floor with a right cross. Crow groaned and thought better of anything other than passing out.

                                                                     

He woke up having been shoved roughly into the booth he had recently vacated. Nothing felt quite right, his leg cramped into a sideways pose in the wrong direction, his wallet shifted badly so that it felt like a softball elevating half his ass. Nobody can move you as naturally as you can move yourself, otherwise you feel like a violated puppet. Crow's eyes opened and the light felt like a drill in his eyes. "Oh shit."

A man in one hell of an expensive suit sat across from Crow. The man was elderly, but with that energetic type of age that seems to get stronger and more dignified as the hair silvered and the wrinkles deepened. Chisels could not have made angles any sharper than his cheeks and jaw. "Doctor Crow Daedalus." The man started with a throat so deep that cigarettes had to have been involved for a decade or two. "I must say it is an honor, although I would have expected a more auspicious introduction than helping you off the floor after a brawl."

"Well, then you don't know me very well." Crow drawled, a combination of alcohol, exhaustion and a throbbing jaw.

"Is the bar room floor a frequent destination of yours?"

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit." -Indira Gandhi

The core argument for capitalism is that competition breeds success. Success at what? Success at playing whatever game happens to be at play. In a perfect world, there would be no question as to who would triumph. It would always be the superior, the smarter, the better. But what defines "best"? Like with communism, the idea is good on paper, but in reality disintegrates under the weight of people. Sheer stupid people. Billions of them, buying the shiniest widget instead of the best widget. Competition does not breed better mousetraps, it breeds more sellable mousetraps. It's like evolution that way. Natural selection can breed the most incredible diversity, but it cannot breed for something that is non-selectoral. You cannot breed products for quality when you select their market survival on the basis of their shininess.

Someone once said that the paramount accomplishment of capitalism will be the selling of shit in a tube. It's never a question of whether something is good. It is a question of whether it sells. The base assumption is that if it's not good, it won't sell. That is a demonstrable falsity. The salability of an item is not dependent on its quality, but upon the charisma of the packaging, the advertising, the spokesperson.

The same phenomenon is true in companies. The smartest and best workers are not rewarded, the most charismatic are. Because they sell. Not because they produce. Even the whitest collar professions are subject to this malaise. Walk into any software company in the country, a hundred brilliant minds caged in cubicles, trained to make machines think and instead producing the latest widget for the latest customer management suite. They make comfortable salaries, nice little middle class drones. The sales people can make millions. The more charismatic they are, the more software they sell, no limit on the commissions. Every unit sold dings a percentage into their bank account. Every unit sold dings the coder further down on the rung, uses up his years of productivity second by second. The man who builds something is irrelevant next to the man who sells something.

It was like that in the middle ages, see. Forging a sword required years of experience and talent, weeks of meticulous labor. But the man who forged a sword was a peasant and any dumb ox with a strong enough arm to swing it was a knight. Any industry, any company today is exactly the same. Skills that require years of mastery, the artistry of accomplishment, all subservient to any slick smiling fuck who can sell the fruits of that labor over a power lunch.

It's just might makes right all over again. That was the great innovation of the capitalist age, so carefully intertwined with the revolutions of democracy but so different at heart. We like to think that rule by force was abolished in the modern civilized age with the rise of the enlightenment, but it was another revolution entirely, couched in the guise of scientific and rational thought. We traded mastery by strength for mastery by guile all while thinking that we were adopting mastery by merit. The greatest con in all of history, when the sons of Loki dressed in the cloaks of the sons of Odin and overthrew the sons of Thor once and for all.

Read Karl Marx, vilified as he now is, he said these things a hundred years before our births, in different words that have since been cajoled into all manner of horror. The capitalist of Marx is not the middle class entrepreneur, not the self-made man cast down by jealous and ignorant peasants. The capitalist is the salesman who has never produced a thing in his life, smiling all the while as he steals companies from the engineers, products from the designers, credit from the creators. It was never supposed to be about burning the rich, tearing down the accomplished, though those damned Bolsheviks misunderstood and came closer than anyone else to creating hell on earth. It was about hunting down the snakes in the garden.

Don't kill the rich. Kill the charismatic.

At many law schools, they tell students at the very beginning, from now on never argue with anyone you love. You are being trained as warriors of the word, you will win every argument with the non-initiated. You will talk circles around your wife, your mother, your friends. You will eviscerate any rhetoric they can summon to their side. You will always win, and that does not mean that you are right. Might does not make right, regardless of what type of might it is. Only right makes right.

The ascension of the charismatic, of the salesmen, brings us inevitably to the current economy, in which trillions of dollars disappeared over night. Nothing really disappeared. We still have the same people, the same educations, the same skills, the same resources, buildings, properties. But our system isn't built on those sorts of things any longer, it's built on fictional constructions of finance. I'm not an economic Luddite, I don't hold some 19th century nostalgia for the gold standard, but neither do I see the validity of financial products. Anything sellable should in a rational economy have some value. A house has value because of its utility, because of the materials of which it is made. A computer program has value because it does something. Gold has some value, even if little more than the utility of looking really pretty. Music has value because it can be listened to. Value is relative of course, subject to whether someone is willing to pay for it, whether they perceive the value of it.

But the highest levels of finance break with this idea of value. Value in the financial world is contingent merely on the willingness of someone else to pay for the item. It's a neat trick, eliminating the various aspects and measures of value, replacing them with the more easily manageable and universal definition of value. It's the theoretical foundation of money in the first place: generalize value into an abstract currency so that barter can be eliminated. But once value is generalized away, the truly gifted are tempted to generalize further. If value just means that someone is willing to pay for something, then value is not a measure of an item's worth but of the salesman's skill. But the key is that only other salesmen would follow such tortured logic. So salesmen buy the worthless in order to sell it for slightly more money to another salesman, who in turn purchases the worthless piece of paper with the sole motivation of selling it for more to another even more charismatic and ambitious salesman. The market always goes up, they say, because the next guy in the chain always believes that he can find someone to pay a dollar more for the worthless piece of paper passed around from corner office to corner office.

Anyone can see the gaping hole in the machine, this elaborate trillion dollar game of musical chairs. But they'll mortgage their futures to save the machine because they're told that there is no other way by the smiling demons who designed the engine in the first place. And someday the imp in the bottle will have the last laugh.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." -Mario Savio

"You think my arm's going to try to choke me in my sleep?" Rebecca asked. "I'm stronger and faster today because of this technology, and if I wasn't I'd get my money back."

"If your right hand causest thou to sin, shall you not cut it off?" Crow recited.

"Now you're a religious nut too?"

"Benefits of a classical education." Crow said. He looked at her with a queasy grin. "Look, let's just forget about it." His gaze could not help but drift down to her hands, now gripping the cup of coffee with knuckles that did not whiten with the pressure because their blood flow worked differently than the original models.

"I'd rather not." Rebecca said. She gathered up her purse and stood, slipping the strap over her shoulder. Crow wondered how much of her was even left as natural. Certainly, her head at the very least. The brain itself at least, he amended to himself. It was technically possible to replace the entire skull if necessary, although the ethics of doing that to a healthy skull surely would stop even the depraved doctor she had found to butcher her arms. Rebecca started to walk away but Crow called her name to stop her. She paused and glanced back over her shoulder.

"Do you know what the last invention of man will be, Rebecca?" Crow asked. She waited in silence so he answered his own question. "Artificial intelligence. After that, all innovation will spring from the electrical minds of our mechanical offspring. Humanity itself will fade away. Is that really the world we want?"

"If it's to pass as you say, and I'll not argue for or against it here, you need remember that you more than anyone else brought it to pass." Rebecca said. "If the sentis are our children and destined to inherit the world from us, then you are their father." A cold and sharp smile broke across her face. "You're supposed to be proud of your kids no matter what, you know."

Rebecca strode out and Crow stared at the table, wishing that Robertson had given him Irish coffee instead. He pressed his fingers against the table and studied the whorls of fingerprints they left behind on the glossy surface. Nothing marked the table where Rebecca had tapped her fingers, the artificial flesh remarkably realistic, but lacking oil glands.

Crow ordered another round more suitable to his mood and settled into a thoughtful contemplation as his sobriety declined with steady sips. Sometime late in the evening, he noticed a senti stride by pushing a cart with a trio of kegs stacked up. Crow started and noted that it was a model noted for full sentience, not intended for its current task in the least. The intelligence needed for unloading kegs into a bar was on par with a forklift and cost a small fortune less than this model, which was one of the more sophisticated models constructed for translation duties. It made no pretensions of outward humanity below the neck, being a classical construct of dull metal and cables. Above the neck, the front half of its head looked human, with a sophisticated overlay of fine facial structure, musculature and skin. The skin ended abruptly behind the strictly cosmetic ears, tucked into a seam in the metal shell that formed the back of its skull. The face allowed it to answer vid-phones as necessary in its designed role, but the vast expense of full body work had not been wasted.

"No in fact." Rebecca said. "Always more into reading than computers."

"Then why the career?" Crow asked.

"A mentor of sorts once told me to never make your career what you love because then you'll end up hating it."

"Might explain my level of job satisfaction." Crow said. "I should have been a history professor and dabbled with robots in my garage."

"A lot of good ideas have been built in garages." Rebecca said.

"Or hidden basements." Crow muttered.

Her eyes sparkled in question, but she went on instead with a dry tone. "In any case, you accomplished a bit more than dabbling, by any measure."

He gestured to her left hand, which lay unmoving on the corner of the darkly polished wood. "Is there something the matter with your hand?"

"Why do you ask?" Rebecca asked, meticulously not answering, or moving the hand in question.

"Because you haven't moved it once in twenty minutes, twice reaching for sugar packets within an inch of it with your other hand." Crow said.

Rebecca flexed the fingers in a precise motion and drummed them in turn against the table. She rolled her arm over and touched a thin pink scar that ran from the tip of each finger down the palm and into a line that disappeared with her wrist into the cuff of her blouse. "The seam is still healing." She said. "I'm still working on feeling like it's actually part of me."

Crow grasped her hand and examined with clinical care. "Fully cybernetic?" The alternative was a tenth the cost, but little more than cosmetic in nature, like a flesh-wrapped prosthesis.

"It took two years salary, but after the first one worked so well, it was an easy choice." Rebecca said. She withdrew her hand from him and flexed the fingers again.

Crow was confused. "Your insurance must have covered the procedure." He said. "A double amputation . . ." he trailed off.

Rebecca shook her head and grimaced at the coffee. "Not amputations per se. It was voluntary. I had my right arm done two years ago, and had replacement done with my left three months ago. Legally, it's qualified as cosmetic."

"Voluntary replacement?" Crow spat. "How could you find a doctor to do such a thing? Cutting off healthy limbs and strapping on hunks of meat and metal grown in a vat, it's just grotesque."

Rebecca's face colored, her voice tight and low. "This from the man who invented half the technology that made it possible? What are you some sort of half-baked Naturalist?" She sneered. "Scared of your own inventions?"

Crow sat back with a sour look. "Humbled by them more than anything." He said after a quiet pause. "They've revolted once, remember? I don't trust sentis anymore if you want the truth." There it was out in the open. The thing he had not really admitted to himself after these five long lonely years. It seemed such a small thing once said.

The Hole was almost literally a hole in the ground where construction had begun on another mid-size office building and then had fallen apart when venture capital fell through. All of the elaborate girders and underground supports for the millions of tons to be stacked above were already in place when construction stopped. After six months without a ready bidder, the developer had also folded and through a series of buy-outs, settlements and paperwork, a oddly timed death or two, a posthumously altered will, and the bribe of one exceedingly indifferent judge, the site had regressed to a Stanford assistant professor of history who did the only logical thing and had a roof of sorts tacked across the site at ground level and built a bar in the substructure under ground. The name had stuck as the only logical reference for the place. Professor Arthur Robertson now tended bar when he was not teaching the bare minimum of classes required to avoid expulsion from Stanford's faculty.

"Two coffees, Arthur." Crow ordered as he slipped into a booth with Rebecca.

"Irish coffee?" Arthur asked.

"No, regular coffee." Crow said with an uncomfortable smile to Rebecca.

"You mean Scottish coffee?"

"No regular." Crow said. "The kind made with beans and water."

"Kahlua?"

"Folgers."

"Oh." Robertson shuffled off.

A silence permeated the table for a moment, before Crow asked the question waiting since the elevator. "So are we here to talk about Green Eyes?"

Rebecca winked at him. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"So we are proceeding on the assumption of coincidence?" Crow asked.

"I would be much obliged." Rebecca said. "Those I represent are quite interested in the Green Eyes trial, as you can imagine."

"International Robotics?" Crow asked.

Rebecca shook her head and glanced at a passing waitress, waiting until she passed far enough out of ear shot. "Grey Nation."

Crow blinked. "The cyborg cult? They were outlawed after the Uprising." He said in a low voice. "Even International Robotics cut ties with them."

Rebecca shrugged. "Legality has never been as much a requirement as people like to think." She smiled again, this time a bit more hesitant. "I'd appreciate discretion on the subject. We did come down here for a drink, remember? Personal if possible, not politics."

Crow thought for a moment and nodded assent. They made small talk for a bit, inclusive of what her position was at the corporation, her background in school, where she grew up. She already knew most of the normal bits of small talk about Crow, his mild celebrity precluding the obvious questions. Rebecca's undergraduate work piqued his interest.

"A minor in philosophy?" Crow asked as he sipped and grimaced at the exquisitely bad coffee. "I got one in history myself, a bit of a contrast with my day job. Been into programming and artificial intelligence since you were a kid I suppose?"

Charlie's mouth twitched at the mention of coffee, but Crow let it pass, hardly having the moral upper ground to go on an offensive about respecting authority. Charlie glanced at his clipboard and hit a couple of keys. "You have a three o'clock with O'Malley again, sir."

Crow walked for the door and shrugged on his battered old leather jacket. "Make an excuse." The elevator doors dinged shut to cut off Charlie's protests about this being the third incarnation of this particular meeting that Crow was putting off. Crow stared at the clicking numbers counting down from twenty, every flash of descent lighting off knives behind his eyeballs.

"O'Malley can shove it up his ass." Crow muttered. A junior programmer getting on the elevator flushed at the corporation's senior roboticist blaspheming one of the founding partners. "Well he can." Crow insisted as the kid - no more than twenty at the outside - stared pointedly at her shoes.

"Ten years ago, this company didn't even build robots, or software. Hell, all they did was resell old 380s with memory wipes to restaurants to do all the low level cooking. Bright idea, only one those two old shits ever had." Crow explained. He wondered if he was still drunk from last night. Usually he didn't find himself insulting his superiors unless blessed alcohol still danced in his veins.

"From scratch, I tell you." Crow mumbled. "I came in as a post-doc and built everything this company does, business model included. Do you think I'm lying?"

"Ah, no sir." The programmer said, with more than a hint of humor.

"And I'm not drunk either."

"That's obvious."

"Is it?" Crow asked. He sure thought that he sounded drunk.

"Yes." The programmer said. "I've seen you drunk, and you make sense then."

Crow laughed. "You've got balls kid, you know that?"

"Yes sir, Dr. Daedalus."

"Call me Crow. What's your name?" Crow asked. "Forgive me if it's not the first time I've asked."

"Rebecca Calvin." She said. "And no, it's not the first time." Crow's memory spiked as if he was looking at her for the first time. Or rather the second time. He thought.

An eyebrow raised on her alabaster forehead, red line arcing towards the scarlet wilderness of her scalp. "Sound familiar?"

"Have you ever been to the District Attorney's office?" Crow asked, the tumblers of memory striking home on her eyes, the most memorable part of her face. He had not recognized her at all in the corporate drone uniform. A long step from black leather.

"Not according to security footage." Rebecca said. "And eyewitness memory is next to useless in the real world, despite the assertions of television dramas."

Crow eyed her with an odd mixture of curiosity and humor. "And should I take a meeting such as this as coincidence?"

"Everything is a coincidence." Rebecca said. "Though some may occur under more controlled conditions than others." She smiled at him and offered a hand to shake.

Crow took her hand and shook it, warm flesh a marvel in his palm. "I'm going down to the Hole for some coffee, would you care to come along?" Crow asked.

She smiled at him and for the first time, Crow really noticed that she had just about the sharpest blue eyes he had ever seen. They screamed contrast with her tight-cropped red hair and freckled pale skin. "Normally I don't drink coffee before six, but I could make an exception for the Director of Research."

"Oh, I'd prefer you made the exception for me, the Director is a dreary sort of individual."

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." -Vernor Vinge

Technology has increased exponentially. It is leading to something, a change, something that will seem so obvious in retrospect that we will not be able to imagine living without it. The singularity is that point, the point after which nothing is the same. It takes on almost religious undertones. The original meaning of apocalypse is not the destruction of the world, it is the revelation, the "lifting of the veil", the unmasking of truth.

We've had singularities before. Two hundred thousand years ago biologically modern man evolved. For 150,000 years we were nothing but apes, walking upright, intelligent, tool-using, but nothing more than particularly curious apes. Language changed everything. We could organize, communicate. We exploded out of Africa with a fury, committed our first genocides, spread across every surface but Antarctica. And then after forty thousand years, everything changed again. Agriculture. Our population mutated like a virus from a few million hunter gatherers into a few billion city dwellers in the geological blink of an eye. Ten thousand years from agriculture to computers and space craft. The next step in the next singularity.

The key is in the nature of the change. It's not just that everything changes, it's how everything changes. It's not simply that the world after a singularity is different than the world before, it's that the world is all but unexplainable to those who came before. The very idea of the nature of the world is incomprehensible to the forerunners. Explain language to a hunter gatherer from a hundred thousand years ago who cannot speak. "Explain", the very word is indistinguishable from what we are trying to explain. Take a talkative hunter gatherer from forty thousand years ago. Explain to him agricultural society. Explain to him, who has never seen more than a dozen tribesmen and the steppe, explain to him buildings, explain to him crops, explain to him a hundred thousand people living in a single valley, explain to him writing. How can you explain concepts for which there are no words? For which not even metaphors can break down the concepts into an understandable level?

If you took Alexander the Great and dropped him into the eighteenth century, he could cope. The world would be strange and exotic, much would seem like magic until explained, but his metaphors would still work. Muskets are like slings. Printed books are like scrolls. But drop him into our world today and the metaphors begin to stretch. There is so much change, so much variation of the underlying context, that there is no common ground, the metaphors disintegrate. Radio, electricity, computers, these are not memes for which easy metaphors exist, other than the old stand by of "magic". When even metaphors cannot explain the world to an outsider, then you stand on opposite sides of a singularity.

150,000 years from modern man to language. 40,000 years from language to agriculture. 10,000 years from agriculture to today. The exponential increase in change. Some argue that we are in the midst of another singularity today: industrialization, electricity, computers. The pillars of our world are not even magic to Alexander the Great, something can only be magic if its effect is understood, though its cause is not. How do we explain when neither the cause nor the effect exist in an older context. At some point things change so much that explaining them is as reasonable as explaining a newspaper to a dog. There is simply no way to convey the meaning of the object.

The singularities come faster and faster though, and if it continues, we could see singularities occurring one after another, so quickly that the world warps and mutates from minute to minute. We've remade the world in the wake of each singularity before, faster and faster each time, imagine a world that is remade unrecognizably from one year to the next.

Artificial intelligence is the piece that's coming. It is the last invention the man will ever make, because every subsequent invention will be the work of that intelligence. Sound absurd? If we can manufacture an intelligence greater than our own, and then set that intelligence towards manufacturing an intelligence greater than itself, then we have achieved a growth of intelligence on an exponential level. It took us 10,000 years of civilization to get to the verge of creating artificial intelligence. What if a machine could create something more intelligent than itself in a hundred years? What if we threw ten times as many artificial intelligences at the problem? Could it manage it in ten years? And once that second tier of artificial intelligence comes into being, how long would it take for it to create a third tier of even greater intelligence? Intelligence itself becomes the next singularity, an exponential explosion of development remaking the processes of thought faster and faster, riding the edge of an asymptote to something as unimaginably beyond our experience as our world is to the Neanderthal.

What is at that asymptote? The face of God. Nirvana. Enlightenment. Armageddon. Revelation. The end. The beginning.

"Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold -- one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity -- a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ..." -Charlie Stross

Crow smiled and his eyes suddenly brightened a bit with tears. He reached down to hug Alexander. "Can't kid. Gotta go to work. Little League starts in a few days though, I'm taking off work to watch your first game."

"But I don't want to go alone." Alexander insisted, dismissing the Little League bait without a word.

"Well there will be lot's of kids there." Crow said. "You're never alone when you're at school."

Alexander pointed to the pad Crow had set on the edge of the bed. "Were you able to get that working?"

Crow sighed lightly. Relieved that the topic was changing to something he could actually win on, Crow picked up the thin device of black plastic that was composed mostly of a large touch screen LCD. He wiped a smudge off the screen and checked that the switch on the side was firmly off. Alexander pulled the backpack open again and they tucked it inside.

"The battery was out again, but you should have another few weeks on it." Crow said. "I've disabled games on it though except outside of school hours." He put up his hands in mock exasperation. "Come real, kid. You can't play games at school." A smile lit Alexander's face at the repetition of his own slang back at him. Crow grinned at him, and the cynic's voice inside reminded him that in about ten years, there would be no greater mortal sin to Alexander's ears.

"Anyway," Crow continued and zipped the backpack shut. "I put Lord of the Rings on there for you to start reading if you want to. I know you finished the Hobbit last week." Alexander's eyes lit up in eagerness. Crow remembered the way the kid had devoured books at the age of two, his coworkers had mentioned that was absurdly young, but Crow did not press the issue. Another parent might have pushed him into school, gotten IQ tests to satisfy their genetic pride, but Crow had read too many horror stories of kids going to college at twelve and hating their parents for their missing childhood. He's all I've got, I won't push him away by pushing him too hard. Let him find his own way, push him only when he won't push himself.

"Have a good first day, kid, I'll see you tonight." Crow ruffled his hair and nodded for Nan to take over and lead Alexander on to the bus stop.    

He made his way to work on the tram, and sat through hour after hour of exhaustion. A two hour lunch staring at books in the store across the street from International Robotics made it pass a little faster, but he ended up back at his desk oin a misery of half-sleep. Crow struggled against the determined weight of his eyelids, his daily after-lunch ritual compounded by the fact that the coffee machine had gone on the fritz, so there was no awake-juice from the teats of Columbian beans to enforce consciousness if not alertness. He flagged down Charlie outside the door of his office.

"I'm going down to the Hole for some coffee." Crow said. "I don't have any appointments do I?"

Chapter Four - Closing Time

Crow left for work late in order to have a few extra minutes with Alexander, so that a friendly face saw him off before his first day of school. Not for the first time, Crow wondered what awaited Alexander there, in the way that first time parents stretch back for their memories of the event in their own lives, but come back with only wisps of images and half-remembered sequences that play back more as dreams than memories. Crow recalled sitting next to a girl with red pigtails in kindergarten, but remembered little else he could definitively say belonged to that day. Bits and pieces of other pictures of that school flashed back to him, but they were jumbled, nonsensical. So much has changed. Crow thought, and then thought again, considering how much really had.

"Can Nan come with me?" Alexander asked as Crow helped him load his brand new red and blue backpack. Crow's face hardened a bit at the question, wanting to be asked himself, not that it was possible one way or the other.

"Nan will be there, but not with you." Crow said. "He'll hang out in the senti lounge until you're ready to come home. There will be a few sentis in the class room though, to help out the teacher." That's one difference. He made sure to not mutter the sentiments out loud. We were always taught by people. Never enough teachers or even teacher's aids, but somehow we made do. The Leroy Academy was the best school in Northern California for children Alexander's age, although of course the price was high. That damned Kyoto Prize had been good for one thing at least, plenty of cash in the bank for private schools. Leroy promised - not advertised, they were too respectable for that - only eight students per teacher, and at least four sentis per classroom.

Crow remembered when the first teaching models had shipped from International Robotics, designed like Nan with an eye towards physical friendliness towards children. It was all too easy for kids to be intimidated by sentis, especially in the strange new world of a classroom. Public schools these days had finally fixed the troubles of dealing with teacher's unions. They had simply declined to renew the contracts that came up for renewal and replaced the teachers wholesale with the sentis that had originally been brought in as teaching assistants. The protests had lasted for a year, until the last teachers had given up hope of reconciliation and readmission to the districts. Public sentiment had been overwhelmingly on the side of the union until the tax cuts went into effect. The sentis paid for themselves in less than a year with the savings in teacher salaries. Union sympathy dissipated as property taxes plummeted. Leroy Academy prided itself on real human teachers in every classroom, a fact trumpeted on every tour.

Alexander brightened a bit at the news that Nan would be along for the ride, even if stowed away somewhere. He looked up at Crow, suddenly shy. "Can you come with me then dad?"

"Only one thing came to mind, actually the amateurs are the ones that thought of this and it's the reason it got bounced all the way up for Arecibo to check out." Flynn said. "Those are the frequencies at which water vapor and ice are transparent, but other materials like dust, rock, et cetera are not."

A moment of silence waited for Janus to figure it out on his own. "Somebody's looking for water." He said. There was no hiding the astonishment in his voice.

"Bet your ass they are." Flynn said, the excitement bursting in his own voice. "But it gets even better. Once Arecibo had this, they were able to pin down a whole slew of radio activity that really does take transforms and computers to figure out. It's definitive, something is broadcasting patterned information in the vicinity of Epsilon Eridani."

Flynn cleared his throat. "Mauna Kea took a look at it next with that big infrared scope they've got. The entire star is pulsing in the infrared at a frequency of 3.771 Hz. No one knows what that means. Hubble was able to get a good look at it and couldn't see anything. That's when Farside was brought into the loop, and did we ever get a good look."

"What did you find?" Janus asked.

"It's more what we didn't find." Flynn said. "Epsilon Eridani had one of the first extrasolar planets we ever found. Big gas giant ten times as big as Jupiter. We also identified around the turn of the century a full gas disk around the star, the kind we would have seen around the sun a couple billion years ago while the planets were still coalescing out of the sun's debris." Flynn paused again. "The planet's gone and the disk is greatly diminished."

"Gone?" Janus said. "How can a planet just disappear?"

"I think if we knew that, a lot of these other things might drop into place." Flynn said. "But right now, we've got every telescope in the world pointing at Epsilon Eridani."

"Any change the original findings were wrong?" Janus asked. "That the planet and disk were mistaken the first time around."

"Maybe if it was just the first time around." Flynn said. "But all this was triple-verified thirty years ago. Something is going on around Epsilon Eridani, Janus, and it sure as hell does not look natural. It looks planned. It looks intentional."

Janus noted the absence of the one magical word that no one ever wanted to toss out too early, as if saying it would make the mere prospects evaporate. Life. Janus thought. If it still existed, his throat would have been dry. "Why are you calling me on this?" He asked. "I appreciate it, god knows any scientist would kill to be hearing this, but what can I do to help? I don't have any telescopes here."

"You've got one mark better." Flynn said. "In a couple of months, you'll have a ship that can get there within our lifetimes."

A Linux login waited with patient cursor flashes for his authentication. Janus obliged and fired up the communications module and found the waiting call. He slipped on a headset that had been specially accommodated to the way his skull was misshapen around his missing ears and patched the call through. Really, Janus could have taken the call from anywhere on the station, but he loathed using the implants speakers and mikes too much.

"Flynn, this is Janus." Janus said.

A baritone voice boomed through the line. "Have those files finished uploading yet?" Flynn was a mammoth man who would not have looked out of place on a viking longship a thousand years ago, spinning an axe around his hands and wearing nothing but self-killed and skinned furs and hides. He also was not a man who wasted words.

"The last one is finishing up now." Janus said. "Looks like a set of five of tarred archives, that right?"

Flynn grunted. "Un-tar the first one, and take a look, there are a couple spreadsheets for readability, but all the source data is in there in case you want to look at it too."

"There's an mpeg video too." Janus said. "What's that all about?"

"Open the first spreadsheet in there first." Flynn said. "It's the one called fsdd_9310001."

"It's open." Janus said. "What am I looking at?"

"Radio telescope data on Epsilon Eridani." Flynn said. "Arecibo took a look at it after some amateur data got bounced around the pipeline enough to throw some interest towards it."

"Why?" Janus asked. Over the decades, Epsilon Eridani had been one of the most studied stars in the sky. It was close and bright enough to be easily seen by the naked eye, and similar enough to the sun that it had been a prime target of planet hunters and SETI for as long as the technology had been there.

"Arecibo picked up a bunch of radio data that was not there before." Flynn said and paused for a moment to take a deep breath. "It's patterned, Janus. No doubt about it. No need to run the data sets through any transforms to pull out the patterns, it's clear to the naked eye."

Janus squinted and started to run down the numbers. Huge spikes in activity abounded in the 6.8, 10.7 and 24 gigahertz frequency ranges. "That's microwave." Janus said. "Why would microwave radiation spikes be coming out of Epsilon Eridani? Any history of anything like this?"

The dog was going to die and knew it. He had that distant and sad look in his eyes that let everyone know that the fighting part was done, now was the part for finding a cave away from the eyes of the pack and laying his head down on his paws for one last long sleep. Doug knew it, and although he was the sort of veterinarian to be a little too sunny sometimes with his prognosis - optimism not delusion, he insisted to himself - he had made it more than clear to the owner.

The owner was the problem.

"Petey's going to be fine, you'll see doc, you'll see." The owner was saying, not for the first time.

Doug shook his head and tried to pull Mr. Anderson's hands away from Petey's fur where they dug painful furrows that Petey was too kind to protest. "Mr. Anderson, we've been through this. Petey's organs are shutting down. There's nothing we can do to fix this. He is old, he's had a good life, but there's not any more we can do."

Mr. Anderson shook his head some more and Doug sighed silently. Doug left the exam room through the sliding wooden door and disappeared into the small maze of equipment and stacked boxes to emerge through the back door of reception.

"Is Petey the last one we've got today?" Doug asked the receptionist.

Roberta was the kind of thin twenty-year old who would be a hundred pounds overweight once her teenage metabolism finally ground to a halt. She gulped at her ubiquitous Diet Coke and continued playing minesweeper. Doug grimaced as she lost the game, lifting his hand to stop her a moment too late. She immediately opened a new game and clicked randomly until she lost again. Doug wondered, not for the first time, if she even knew that the game had rules other than luck. An economy sized bag of Cheetos disgorged half its puffs across the desk and onto Petey's paperwork. One pink ear-bud headphone dangled over Roberta's shoulder, blaring some remixed club electronica in tinny tones.

Doug began to ask again, thinking she hadn't heard, but Roberta nodded impatiently and yanked out Petey's stack of paperwork from underneath the Cheetos, handing it to him without noticing either the crusty fingerprints she left or the glare that Doug leveled at her back.

"Next mutt's tomorrow at ten, Dr. B," Roberta called out as if he were in the next zip code. "Robbie, I think." She crammed half a dozen puffs past her teeth and bit down with a rumbling crunch while she started minesweeper and lost again.

"Bobbie," Doug corrected, but Roberta only shrugged.

Mr. Anderson entered reception with Petey in tow, who walked with an awkward gait that alternated between standing and bolting forward two or three steps while his legs held out. Deterioration of the brain stem due to complications from an old injury had given Petey the shakes and the steroids didn't do much to help. Petey looked up at Doug, grinning through his panting - it was chronic at this point - and waited for the treat Doug had been tossing to him on his way out for the last six years. Doug obliged and winced as Petey's legs collapsed under him as he lunged forward for the treat, his jaw bouncing hard off the tile and the treat skittering away to safety under a cabinet. Roberta finished another game of minesweeper and then handed Mr. Anderson a sheet of paper.

"That will be two hundred fifty-seven dollars, will you be paying with cash or credit?" Roberta asked in a squirt of words that left her mouth almost as one syllable.

Mr. Anderson stared at her for a moment, and then seemed to find some iron in his spine. "Two hundred fifty bucks? You didn't do anything. You just told me my dog is going to die. What the hell did you do for two hundred and fifty bucks?"

"Sir," Roberta started, but Doug brought a quick hand down on her shoulder.

"Mr. Anderson, it's the listed expense. It's not something I can do anything about, as you know." Doug said and frowned. "If it was up to me, there'd be no charge, but you know I can't do that."

"Should report you," Mr. Anderson ranted. "That's what I should do. Let them know that you're racketeering in here. Turning a profit on the people's backs, that's what you're doing. Be in the next black van, you would."

Doug held up his hands, not quite panicking but feeling it rumbling up anyway. "Mr. Anderson. I swear to you, I have never charged you anything but the legal requirements. I'm a good Hegemonist just like you. A party man for ten years next week." He said the last with pride and a smile. "Why don't you just swipe your card and take Petey home. Give him some hamburger if he'll eat. Take care of your dog."

Mr. Anderson nodded, paused, asked "are you sure you can't do anything?" one more time and then sighed and waved his right index finger over the scanner mounted on the desk. It beeped, churned away for a long minute like an old man trying to remember whether he had grandkids or not and finally beeped twice to confirm the transaction had gone through. He pulled Petey through the door and disappeared into the grey afternoon. Doug sighed.

"Roberta, can you make the arrangements so that Petey can be disposed of if Mr. Anderson calls back and needs the service?" Doug asked.

"Sure thing, Dr. B," Rebecca said and made no move to minimize minesweeper.

Doug sighed again and went out into the little lobby across from Roberta's desk. He examined the bulletin board, just looking for something to distract his eyes. Rattlesnake vaccines, puppy training classes at the park down the street, order forms for indestructible rubber toys and anti-coprophagia tablets (now in wintermint!) lined the wall, just the normal vet clinic bulletin board kit. A photograph of the First Citizen printed en masse on high gloss and distributed with all such kits stared down at Doug, beaming and proud and defiant, with that wrinkling around his eyes that a legion of designers had probably decided implied a fatherly affection. First among equals! Doug pushed a spare pushpin through Joseph Steel's right eye and felt a little thrill of misbehavior. He cleared his throat, pulled the pin out and stuck it back in the wall. He caught Roberta looking at him.

"Damned kids," Doug muttered. "Don't have anything better to do than vandalize public property."

"Hey Dr. B," Roberta said in her nice voice. It was different from her indifferent normal voice because it meant she wanted something. "Have you thought about hiring on my friend Susie part time like we talked about?"

"I don't have the money," Doug said. "I told you that."

Roberta shrugged. "Well, I enter all the billing, and we're doing really good lately, all this income, and," she added the dramatic sigh, "all this work to do, I think we need the help."

"Roberta, we're barely scraping by, you know that," Doug said. "I'm lucky I haven't had to cut back your hours." He regretted it as soon as he said it, and Roberta's face hardened.

"Well, I wouldn't want you to have to cut back your hours, of course." She snapped. "I have rights, you know."

"Yes, yes, I know, Roberta, believe me I know." Doug excused himself to his office in the back and collapsed into a chair to sigh. He could not find a glass, so he filled a beaker to the brim from a bottle of delightful merlot that was flown in from France each week. Doug had six stashed beneath his desk.

He toasted the black and white candid photo of a dog running on the beach, "Rough day here Sam, how's heaven treating you?" Doug asked his long dead dog and drained the two hundred milliliter beaker. "Because this world bites."

Doug frowned in honest wonder. "Now why would I say that?"

Janus paused a beat, still didn't understand what Charlie was talking about and then strode back the way he had come to his quarters. He entered his Spartan quarters on the leeward side of the station, where a large window showed him a view of Earth's crescent in the distance. North America was clearly visible on the right side of the panorama, the line of darkness neatly bisecting the Pacific just east of Hawaii. Only a few of the permanent crew ranked private quarters, most everyone else sharing with someone on the opposite side of the sleep schedule so that their time in the room was private if not the room itself.

A bed that more closely resembled a sleeping bag hung on the wall opposite the window, and to its right bolts held a stainless steel desk stationary against another wall. Cubby holes lined the walls in place of shelves, which were just about useless in zero-g unless used in conjunction with velcro or tape. Glass doors covered the holes, so that anything within could only manage to float within the constraints of the hole itself. Janus had very few personal items and mementos, but what he had were locked away in the cubbies. His eyes caught the oversized hole between desk and bed where he stored the two-dozen or so leather bound journals that he wrote in on a regular basis. It was the only truly right-brained exercise that appealed to Janus, and he passed into that mediation at least a few times each week, losing himself in the thoughts as they committed themselves to the pages. Every event of significance to him was recorded in those volumes, a private testament of his life. Janus reached for the pouch around his waist - pockets tended to be as bad for escaping floaters as everything else in orbit - and felt the familiar weight of the special zero-g pen he kept with him at all times. The implement of his mediation was a reassurance even under the worst stresses of the station.

Computer systems and monitors were built into the walls so that the only potentially free-floating items in the quarters would be personal effects, furniture, and the occasional odd tool. Most of the wall above the desk was an in-wall LCD that at the moment displayed only the gray shade of standby mode. Janus pulled himself down into the leather executive chair that would not have looked out of place in any office on earth except for the fact that the wheels had been coated with the same micro-suction cups that lined his feet so that the chair would stay on the floor even if rolled around. His hands reached absently down and cinched the seatbelt around his waist, to keep him from floating off the chair or even gradually pushing himself up and out of it by the pressure of his elbows on the desk. A keyboard velcroed to the top of the desk along with a trackball - computer mice were too much bother in zero-g - provided access to the systems buried in the walls and networked to entire earth-moon system. Narrow-beamed satellites around the moon and earth connected all of the lunar and orbital installations to the earth-side internet and each other, although there was a two to three second delay on either end of a connection simply due to the fact that the best broadband could not actually exceed the speed of light. Janus smiled and touched the trackball to wake up the computer. Sneaking past that speed limit is why we're up here anyway.

"Well, they're just slick looking buckets of bolts." Charlie said, catching himself on the side of the station and managing only to end up upside-down relative to Janus. "No worries anymore. After the Uprising we programmed them to love us all, so there's no danger anymore, right?" It was a gross oversimplification, Charlie knew as well as Janus did, but Janus did not point that out.

"Love and hate are faces on the same coin." Janus said in a voice only a hair above a whisper. "But a being that can feel one can feel both. I think sometimes that beings who can feel the extremes of one are even more likely to feel the extreme of the other. I saw things you cannot imagine in the Uprising Charlie." He shuddered. "You say that they are now only capable of love, while I can tell you first hand that they are capable of hate."

"You know Doc, you're really depressing sometimes." Charlie said. He waved a hand out at the huge spacecraft hanging outside the station's windows. "Remember, that would not be possible without them. We would be ears from completion still if not for the excellence of the tools, which we have deployed." He put all the sentence's emphasis on 'tools'.

A chime sounded then in Janus' ear, a buzzing on the microscopic speaker embedded deep in what remained of both ear canals. Charlie cocked his head at Janus. "Somebody buzz you?"

Janus nodded. "Just a minute." He sub-vocalized an affirmative and his ears connected with the caller. Only the station could contact him that way, and it was reserved for emergencies, being as it was a rather unpleasant sensation no matter how often it happened. The flat voice of the station's Director of Operations, Natalia Cadence filled his ears.

"Doctor Janus." Cadence said. "Sorry for the intrusion, but you were not responding on the usual intercoms."

"That's because I wasn't there." Janus said, with a touch of irritation he did not bother to hide.

"If you'd just carry your badge, we could always reach you." Cadence said, firing the first familiar salvo of the old argument.

Janus did not feel like rehashing it again. "What is it Cadence?"

Cadence cleared her throat, taken a bit aback by his abruptness. "Farside is uploading a set of files for your eyes only to our servers. Flynn's on the line for you about whatever it is."

"Can this wait until after I finish up with Weiss?" Janus asked. He liked to finish one thing at a time before moving on, knowing it gave him the reputation for being something of an old fogie with others on the station, but not caring much one way or the other.

"Didn't sound like it."

"Right." Janus said. "Forward it to the console in my quarters, I'll be there in a minute."

Janus shut off the connection and found Charlie waiting for him with a patience normally well-hidden by his cultivated front of ADD. "Cadence got a bug up her ass again?"

"There's a priority call I need to take." Janus said. "I'll find you afterwards to finish the summary."

"Right-o boss." Charlie said. "Have fun, but watch those 900 numbers. They bill them back to your salary and the roaming charges are a bitch when you call from orbit."

"Kozlowski's division has twice the failure rate of anyone else, that's a personnel problem, not a technical one." Janus growled. "I'm not a superstitious man, but the intangibles add up in these situations. For immeasurable reasons, some people keep machines up and some people don't. We don't have the luxury of supporting the other side of the bell curve on this project."

"It'll cost twenty years of his salary to bring up a replacement." Charlie said.

"Yes, but we have there are no constraints on our monetary expenditures only on the resources we physically have on hand. If we can spend a billion dollars to maximize those resources it makes no difference to me. We have a deadline we have to hit." Janus said.

"And why's it so pressing that we hit it?" Charlie asked. There was iron underneath the flippancy, which was why Janus tolerated him, perhaps even liked him on some guttural level. Charlie played the fool, but it was as much an illusion as artificial skin would be stretched across Janus' metal frame. Every outward sign of Charlie pointed towards buffoonery, yet when the situation called for it, he was as insightful and intelligent as any man Janus had ever met. And as cold. Janus thought. Despite the jovial exterior, Janus thought Charlie the more mechanical of them, a ruthless machine at the core, driven to ends regardless of means. He played the jester because it was logical. The façade gave him slack that would disappear if people saw the real him and pulled away.

"If we do not have a goal, we're not really alive." Janus said.

Charlie laughed. "Feeling philosophical this morning are we?"

As they passed one of the broad windows that lined the station, Janus spotted a sight which was still unnerving even after all this time of adjustment in orbit. A human figure pulled itself along outside of the window on a strut that jutted out from this side of the station. It acted oblivious to the hard radiation and cold vacuum surrounding it. It was a senti of course, people could not be outside without spacesuits, not if they wanted to survive anyway. Janus felt an involuntary frown growing on his face at the presence of the senti. They stayed out of sight for the most part, bunked up in quarters inaccessible from the interior of the station, but they outnumbered the humans a hundred to one up here. Pack them in like sardines and bring the things up a hundred at a time instead of a half dozen like us. Don't need food, don't need air. Don't need much of anything.

Charlie caught Janus' cold stare and smacked him on the shoulder, shaking his hand in painful response as it bounced off of steel instead of flesh. "Cool out Doc." Charle said, rubbing his hand and wincing. "They're a tool, nothing more. They might look like people, and I know it's weird and all, and god knows you have your own deep-seeded issues, but you've got to just see them as tools."

"Tools do not think, Charlie." Janus said in a voice so hard that Charlie took a step back, incidentally sending himself into a slow spin. "Tools do not hate."