Work Text:
It starts small, as these things so often do. He’ll help a friend, someone he knows won’t rat him out. He’ll scrub their interface or even their augment storage before the quarterly company sweep. He’ll jailbreak their spare touch interface to remove the metadata gathering processes and make it impossible to connect it to the feed, so it can be used to view the kind of contraband passed around hand to hand on scuffed data clips. They’ll slip him a little currency or a few meal packs, and his hidden savings grow.
Word spreads, slowly and cautiously, the few people he trusts mentioning him to the few people they trust. The person at the scruffy little live-music venue who sells him the pills that purge the stimulants from his bloodstream when he actually has a full day off and can sleep in asks him about decrypting some files. His work friend’s cousin needs an interface cleansed before they start their contract.
All contracts ban outside work. Everyone with the requisite skills and nerve does it anyway. Once he takes that first step into the shady side, he learns things about beating the system. Need a new pair of shoes? Buy them with salary credits. Buy an identical pair with your hidden income. Switch them off. He’s still wearing the same pair of shoes every day, like everyone else. But he ‘got lucky’, and his last a long time. He gets to stash a little of that salary in his legit savings, the amount he would have spent on another pair if they’d worn out on schedule, all above-board from the company’s lens.
Savers skip meals. His spending reflects that. His secret funds buy nutrient bars in places that don’t officially exist, so he’s not battling hunger while he’s trying to do his day job. He walks the line, living one industrious, deprived life in the light and one dangerous, better-compensated life in the shadows. He’s one of many, but his skills are a cut above most of those who dare, and his specialty is prized in the underground.
It helps that his company has no reason to look at him too closely. He does good work and doesn’t cause trouble. He lives alone, no partner or family to distract him from his contribution to the bottom line. He’s quiet, cautious; most of his coworkers respect but don’t really like him. He can be abrupt and impatient, particularly when someone else’s screw-up makes more work for him. The few coworkers he’s friendly with are much like him, good at their jobs and bad at office politics. He’s never given his employer any reason to think he has enough imagination to rebel against the system in even the smallest way.
An old friend from his university days approaches him with an offer—someone she knows has heard of his work, but isn’t willing to trust him straight off. They have some things that need doing, she’ll be the middle-person. It sounds dodgy as hell, but the compensation offered for the first job is 25% over what he’d normally get for stripping an interface of spyware. Once the device is out of his hands again there won’t be any way to conclusively tie it back to him, unless his friend turns informant. (That’s always the question—how well-placed is his trust?) He does it, fast as he can. The payment arrives as promised, a transfer code buried in an ordinary direct-marketing message that he can invoke from his hidden account.
She comes back on their behalf once every few weeks for half a year. Always a device of some sort. Cleanses, upgrades, repairs. Payment is prompt, secret, and anonymous. His nest egg grows. The advantages of extra nutrition and a slush fund to buy things like antivirals keep him at the top of his game and in his company’s good graces. He’s promoted to Technician Grade 3, with a generous 2% salary increase.
Then, she brings him something that takes him aback: an ID-chip printer. It’s been corrupted by malware—can he fix it? He’s not sure he wants to, intriguing as the technical challenge would be, but the offered compensation is too substantial to ignore. He has no moral qualms about the work—what’s it to him if someone buys a false ID?—but being caught with such a thing would be disastrous. On the other hand, it’s really starting to look like he’ll be able to retire while he’s young enough to enjoy a few years of it before infirmity confines him to a couch and a display screen in some modest elder-care facility, and he just can’t resist the idea of making those years a few months longer, or that facility a little less modest.
He does it, flinching at every sound the entire fortnight it’s in his hands. He has to rewrite whole sections of code from shredded fragments, but it’s not a task beyond his capabilities, merely a time-consuming one. The relief he feels when he passes the thing off is indescribable. He vows never to do anything half that risky again, while knowing he probably will if the money’s good enough.
An invitation follows not long thereafter. They—he’d already suspected this was a black-market group of some sort—have something in need of his skills that they can’t smuggle to him. Is he willing to come to them? He’ll have a contact within the group, possibly more than one in time, if he continues to be trustworthy. There will be opportunity for him to benefit from their work in other ways he might find useful. All he has to do is continue to provide good service, collect his compensation, and keep his mouth shut.
He hesitates. Of course he does. He isn’t reckless by nature. He’s always carefully balanced risk and reward. This would be more of both. He leaves the message unanswered for several days while he considers it. At the job site, his gaze keeps drifting to the stations along the windows, the ones occupied by those who have served the company the longest. A much-coveted perk which, he thinks cynically, costs the company exactly nothing. Some of them are over ninety, spines curved into sickles by seventy-odd years of this work. He isn’t even thirty yet and he already has a persistent ache between his shoulder blades.
He sends his agreement. They reply with instructions: the day after next, at 21:00, order a Last Word at the bar of the acoustic-music club. His new contact will approach him.
He does as he’s told, flinching at the price of the drink, and just as the pale green cocktail is placed before him someone slides onto the bar stool at his right. Tall, augmented, a little older than him, with the kind of clothing and piercings that proclaim they don’t have corporate employment. He checks their public feed ID: Freyda, she/her, touch me only if you want to find out how hard a girl can punch.
Right, then. He looks at her and nods politely. She nods back and orders a Last Word, too, then sends him a chat request which he accepts.
Can you prove you’re really Teo Gurathin?
He had not expected that question. Luckily, he’s come straight from work, so he’s able to set his MetaSoft worker’s badge, with his name and revolving 3D headshot, on the bar between them. She takes her time scrutinizing it, even turning it back and forth in the dim light to catch the holomarks, before handing it back.
Good enough. I’m Freyda, and I’ll be your contact. You’ll see others from time to time. Don’t approach them. If they need or want an introduction, they’ll come to you. Follow me. She grins like a shark and slides off her stool, taking a draught of her cocktail. He takes a cautious sip of his as he follows her down the back hall towards the restrooms. Citrus and herbs and the boreal bite of juniper and pine, amplified by the cold and underscored with sweetness. He’s never had a cocktail before, always settling for the much cheaper options of lager or, occasionally, wine on the occasions he drinks at all. He thinks he could get used to something like this, if he had unlimited funds.
She leads him through a door that says ‘Employees Only’, which opens to her retinal scan. “You’ll contact me when you want to come work. I’ll make myself available.”
They pass through a typical employee break room, with a table and food prep area and a small bank of lockers. She peers into what looks like a small rusted-out hole on the side of one locker, and with a faint click the whole group swings out like an antique-style door. Behind it is a sort of small warehouse, with shadowed rows of tall shelves containing any number of things, many in anonymous bags and boxes and crates. Part of the room is given over to workbenches, with a wall of tools for any imaginable purpose and shelves and bins and drawers full of spare components. She brings him to a workbench atop which sits a long box with a single seam running horizontally around it near the top. It was once glossy white but is now scuffed and dented. On the lid are some faded stickers in a language he doesn’t recognize.
She presses a barely-visible button on one side and the top slides open with a with a hiss. Inside sits a control panel across one end, a narrow wall of unfamiliar machinery around the other three sides, and inside that, a pile of dull synthetic fabric. A limp section of the same material droops from the inside of the lid.
“We’ve got twenty of these and we’ll pay you for each one you get working. We’ll probably have to raid the least salvageable for parts for the rest, but if you can whip at least ten of them into shape there’s a bonus in it for you. We have Q-class recycler, so we can fabricate any basic to mid-tier component you might need to replace and a few higher end ones. Don’t raid the shitty boxes for anything except the specialist parts—new is better, after all. If you find that a lot of the boxes need replacements for specialist components, we’ll bring an engineer in, but we’d like to avoid that if we can. This is an expensive project already.”
“What are they?” he asks.
“Oh, right. Old-style cryo-suspension boxes.”
He backs away, shaking his head. “No. No way. I am not getting involved in human trafficking. I’ll keep my mouth shut, but I’m not going to be any part of that.”
She smirks. “Would it change your mind if I told you our customer is smuggling people out of lifetime labor contracts and into independent polities?”
“It might if I believed it.”
“Look, I get paranoia,” she says. “Everyone around here has a lifetime supply. But think about it for a minute—corporations don’t need to smuggle people in old suspension boxes. When they steal people, they just load ‘em onto their own ships. People travel as cargo to get away from corpos, not to move between them.”
On the surface, that sounds perfectly reasonable. “Won’t a scan reveal that that the contents are a person, not whatever the forged bill of lading says?”
There’s grudging respect in her expression and she nods. “We’ve made a small device that fools scanners into reading the contents of the crate as a shipment of nutritional capsules. The weight of the box, when full, is about the same as that would be. The success of the device is the reason we can move forward with this project now.”
“Can I inspect one of those devices?” he challenges.
She smirks again. “Sure.”
“Is there anything I’m allowed to know about this customer?”
“Rescue group based out of a non-corporate polity,” she says with a shrug. “I can’t give you any identifying information, but they got a hold of these boxes and thought they might be a good way to run small groups and single people, instead of risking their whole ship and crew for less than a good-sized bunch. If we can get the things working, of course.” She eyes him critically for a moment, then adds, “I’ll level with you; this isn’t a money-making proposition for us. We’ll probably end up paying you more than they’ll pay us. But the folks in charge like sticking it to the corpos. Not the first time they’ve made a bad deal for a good cause.”
It all makes sense. There isn’t any way to be completely sure, and that’s something he’ll have to grapple with if he decides to do this. “Let me check out one of those scan spoofing devices and I’ll give you my answer.”
“You drive a hard bargain. But fine.” Her eyes glaze over and she starts to subvocalize. He picks up his drink and sips. If nothing else, he’s gotten a new and pleasant experience out of this.
A drone delivers a package a little smaller than a shoebox a couple of silent minutes later. He’s seen a handful of other people moving around among the shelves, and one middle-aged woman with vivid green hair spends a minute rummaging through a bin nearby before wandering out of sight with a decoupler in one hand and some sort of bot appendage in the other.
Once the box has been deposited on the table, Freyda waves a hand at it. “All yours. Inspect away.”
Most of the device is a whisper-thin filament net. Suspended on one corner is a palm-sized device with a simple on-off switch. He has to pry the back panel off to find a port he can connect to. It takes him the better part of an hour to understand the code, but he gets it in the end. Half the fibers in the netting will absorb incoming scans, preventing them from reflecting back to their origin point. On detection of a scan, the device will cause the rest of the fibers to emit the raw scan data from some actual previous scan of something. A crate full of nutritional capsules, he presumes.
They’ve paid him well for relatively small work, and this is a big project. If he can pull this off, it might mean the kind of money that would allow him to retire in his seventies, which is almost unheard of. Eighty is the age most people try for, eighty-five is closer to what most people manage. Those who retire at all, at least.
“I’ll do it,” he says. They’ll just hire someone else if he doesn’t, right? If they’re lying about the purpose of these boxes, he won’t be helping anyone by declining, and if they aren’t, he might be a small part of saving someone from a mine or the like, someday. He knows he’s rationalizing away the chance that they’re deceiving him, of course, because he wants the money they’re offering and the hope of leisure it represents. Because no one is going to look out for him but himself. His parents only had children for the bonus their contract offered if they produced replacements for themselves. His sibling resents him for qualifying into a more prestigious career track. He hasn’t spoken to any of them in years. He tries to be a decent person by his own standards, but sometimes those standards have to be flexible.
“Great,” she says. “You’ll be paid for each box once it’s working, but here’s a little something by way of a signing bonus.”
She passes him a file in the feed. It’s a copy of a novel that’s been popular lately. Not his preferred genre, but he’ll read just about anything for free. “Thank you.”
She winks and says, “There’s a surprise center. I’m sure you can find it.”
He stays another half hour, plugging into the box’s control panel and downloading its code to a data clip. He’ll hide that in his room and familiarize himself with it during his off hours. Even if he had the space for it in his internal augment, a random storage sweep on the job site is magnitudes more likely than a search of his lodgings; he’d have to be under active investigation for that, and there should be early signs detectable by the wary if such an inquiry were to be launched.
He looks carefully at the book file on his way home. It seems perfectly normal, so whatever is hidden within it is well concealed. He keeps it on his augment, though he won’t access it while he’s at the office.
The next night, he finds the ‘surprise center’. Hidden in chapter 13 is a 10x10-pixel transparent image. The data in its file, teased out of the book’s small image library, contains a plan for assembling an ID-chip writer from common components and a few specialized parts, for which it provides print-on-demand instructions. With access to a decent recycler and an average retail components store, he can make his own ID chips. And now he also knows how to effectively hide information inside a book file. When he finishes the book, he’ll give it a five star rating and mark it as do-not-delete in his storage.
As bonuses go, it’s quite satisfactory.
***
It takes him almost six months to get the first suspension box—the one seemingly in the best shape to begin with—working. Partly because he can only risk going to the workshop once or twice a week, but largely because the thing is complex—keeping a human body in the particular form of ‘frozen’ from which they can be awakened after many years isn’t simple, and the box is probably several hundred years old, making both the components and the coding language highly divergent from what he’s used to working on.
He knows a lot about it now, though. There are parts of it he hardly had to touch, and he’ll have more to learn when (not if; he knows it’s coming) he gets to one where one of those mechanisms or functions is broken, but figuring out the bits that are still a mystery is a much smaller task than understanding the device as a whole and getting to know its antique operating system.
The payment arrives in his secret account on the day he turns thirty, and what fine commemoration of the event it is. During his next shift he eyes the long-timers, bent over their work at their coveted stations, and has the satisfaction of knowing that he is unlikely ever to earn a place there.
In little more than two months he has repaired another suspension box, and by the time he turns thirty-one, he’s nearly done with the fifth. He only repairs three more in the following year, for they are progressively more damaged and worn, but he knows them inside and out by then, every part, every line of code, and he keeps his raiding of the irreparable units to a bare minimum. When he completes the tenth and receives his promised bonus, he tells them he thinks he can repair at least two more, and they readily agree to have him keep working on them.
He delivers those two, as promised, and then comes up against a problem he can’t solve. He has a further two that are nearly repaired, but both require a replacement for the injection system that manages the addition of certain chemicals to the bloodstream during the initial freezing process and the filtering of them from the blood during the revival sequence. It’s a complex little device, and not one he has the knowledge to remake from recycled parts. He gives one of the nonfunctional injectors to Freyda and tells her that if they can get a biomechanical engineer to produce two of them in working order, he’ll get them two more usable suspension boxes, but he’s done all he can for the present.
He goes back to doing smaller jobs for them, things that can be brought to him. Nearly a year goes by in this manner before he is suddenly summoned back to the workshop. Things have changed there—the shadowed shelves are half-empty and fewer people move among them. Freyda is still there, though, and she presents him with two shining new injector devices and asks how long it will take to install them.
“A couple of hours each, and then several hours of testing to verify that everything seems to be in order.” The only way to truly test the boxes would be to put a human in them, of course, but a reasonable level of certainty can be reached by cycling the units through their inbuilt testing routines.
“Can you do them both this week?”
He nods. He can make that happen without too much additional risk to himself. He doesn’t ask what’s going on here, because he doesn’t think for a minute that she’d tell him.
“Great,” she says. “Same fee as the others, and we’ll have another offer you may or may not want to accept afterwards.”
“I look forward to hearing it.” He’s already poised to retire in his early seventies, and that’s without the pay for these two units. If they want to talk to him about another project, he’s eager to listen. It takes a couple of very late nights, but he delivers by the end of the week as promised. Payment is as prompt as ever and arrives with a message to meet his contact in three days’ time.
When he arrives, Freyda takes him back to the workshop. It’s even more bare now; a lot has been moved out in the last few days, though the two suspension boxes he recently completed are still at the station he used. The two of them are the only people there. He thinks he has an idea what they’re going to offer him, and he’s half right.
“We’re relocating,” Freyda tells him bluntly. “This station’s getting a little hot. You’ve done good work for us and proved yourself trustworthy. If you have any interest in getting out of your contract, we can help.”
“I may be interested, depending on what it entails.”
“You could come with us. Work for us. We could use someone like you.”
That’s the offer he expected, and it’s tempting in some ways, but he knows he not cut out for a life entirely in the shadows. He doesn’t think he would have stepped into them at all if there had been any legal way to set himself up for a better life. He’s opening his mouth to express his gratitude but decline when she continues.
“Or we can smuggle you to any of several non-corporate systems where they accept refugees from the Rim.” On the feed she passes him a data packet. A scan of the metadata shows that it’s tagged as information about five different polities. “You don’t have to decide immediately, but we’ll be entirely off this station in eight days. Unless you want to stay here, you’ll need to work quickly. Move as much of your funds as you can onto currency cards, figure out what you’re bringing with you. If you decide to leave, we’ll ship a cubic half-meter crate of your possessions for you. Anything more and you’ll need to arrange shipping.”
That's pretty generous. Like most people, he rents furnished rooms and most of what he actually owns would fit into a cubic half-meter. “Would you get me a fake ID for leaving the system, or would that be up to me?”
“You won’t need one. If you come with us, we have our own ship, and we’ll get you onto it outside your work hours. If you choose to leave the Rim…” She inclines her head toward the suspension boxes and smirks. “How confident are you in your own work?”
***
His task list at work the next day is nearly mindless. He’s running stress tests on a new module for the company’s popular video processing package; all he has to do define acceptable parameters for the results and designate the severity of different warnings and errors that might occur, and his augments can basically do the job without him. It gives him time to think, and he needs it.
He hasn’t officially rejected the offer to join the black market group on a permanent basis, but he can’t really imagine accepting. He realized something about himself in the wakeful reaches of the night: he craves stability. Here, stability requires money, which is the only reason he’d ever dared step outside the lines to begin with. Reaching into the underworld occasionally to secure a little extra currency was one thing. A life entirely on the wrong side of the authorities, however unjust they might be, of moving every few years to stay ahead of them, of always waiting for the raid that occurs without advance warning…well. That’s entirely another. He’s fairly sure the anxiety alone would put him in an early grave, if a security force didn’t.
Stability isn’t really something the system he lives within offers people. He’s clever and realistic enough to see through the propaganda to how things really are. A certain amount of fear, an awareness of the abyss of debt and punishment which awaits those who do not give their all to the job is necessary to maintain productivity and the vast wealth and power of the corporations. But in a relative sense, he has more stability than most. His hidden funds give him that. One more promotion, one more fractional raise, and he can stop all unofficial activities unless something serious like the need for a major medical procedure occurs. He can remain right where he is, where he knows how everything works, and enjoy an approximation of what he really wants.
Or he can reach for the real thing. If he leaves, the choice of polity is pretty obvious. The company he works for outsources systems training to the university on the planet below, and his time there was the best five years of his life to date. The largest of the polities on the list has a university that’s free to residents and known for scientific papers that are reproduced across the Rim and literary, sociological, and philosophical treatises that can’t be reproduced anywhere in the Rim. They have a generous immigration policy and something called a ‘social safety net’ apparently designed on the radical principle that a society can thrive as well or better by keeping its people healthy and contented as by keeping them cowed and scrambling for subsistence. It sounds like his kind of place. Getting there is the tricky part.
When he’d first started working on the suspension boxes, he’d leased a couple of books about pre-wormhole space travel from the library. They’d said suspension boxes had a 5% failure rate. That was averaged over a lot of centuries and a lot of manufacturers, of course. No way to know how close to or far from that figure this particular model had been when it was in use. No way to know if those figures had been fudged for some reason, either.
Assuming they ship him out pretty promptly—assuming they ship him out at all—and assuming someone at the other end triggers the wake-up cycle without much delay, he’ll be in suspension for…30 days? 40? The 5% failure rate is from the old days, when people were often in them for a hundred years or more, and chances were that the rate climbed with time-in-operation. Components would have failed as microscopic flaws expanded with age and use. These boxes, though refurbished, are positively ancient. He runs some partly-theoretical numbers through his analysis software several ways, and arrives at a mean 8.4% predicted failure rate. Call it 10% to be conservative.
A one in ten chance of dying en route or during the long and complicated wake-up process, then. Those odds are enough to make even the most foolhardy hesitate. It’s a mark, he supposes wryly, of his own quiet desperation that he hesitates rather than discarding the idea out of hand.
The thought he keeps coming back to is this: if he dies in the box, he’ll never know. Consciousness is the first thing to be shut off in the suspension process, and the last thing revived. If the box fails, he’ll just never wake up. The chance that he would somehow regain consciousness outside of the long and complicated revival routine is less than negligible. So he may be risking death, but he’s not risking suffering. Which is he most afraid of, really?
***
His whole body stings like a million needles have been poked into his skin and left there. His stomach feels as though it’s trying to crawl up his esophagus; his head throbs viciously. His thoughts are sluggish and vague.
“He’s waking up.” A deep voice, but soft.
Another, higher pitched, direct: “What, already? That’s different.”
Warmth and softness fold around his prickling left hand and squeeze before falling away. The deep voice speaks again. “It’s all right. Take your time. You’re safe. You’ve reached the Preservation Alliance. I hope this is where you were aiming to land.” That last is said with a reassuring hint of humor. “The paralytic is wearing off, but don’t try to move much yet, okay?”
Preservation. That word is important, but he can’t quite get a hold on it. Or anything. What is happening?
“Vitals are stable,” the more feminine voice relates from some farther, but not great, distance. “Neural oscillations are…unusual, but that may be down to the augmentation.”
Augmentation…augment…workspace. Workspace, on.
A world of information blooms in his pounding head. There’s a small file, front and center, tagged highest urgency. Instinctively, his thoughts reach for it, unfold it. It reminds him of what he’s done and why, and of the information he needs to deliver. He opens his eyes, recalled to urgency, uncertainty, fear.
He’s in a hospital room, airy and bright, the suspension box and its lid shoved haphazardly into corner. A friendly-looking man of about his own age is standing by the bed upon which he rests, looking over a touch interface at him, smile widening. An arm’s length away, a middle-aged woman consults a MedSystem display, brow furrowed.
“Hello there,” the man says. “Your ID chip says your name is Teo Gurathin, is that correct?”
He nods, and all the phantom needles in his neck turn savage. Still, he makes himself speak. They have to know, before decisions are made. Talking feels like swallowing glass, but he reads from the script he left himself and is so very glad it’s short.
“I have a master’s degree in systems engineering and thirteen years’ job experience. I can contribute.”
The man’s smile falters, collapses into uncertainty. The woman turns, eyebrows rising over an expression of wry understanding. “I’m sure you can,” she says, “but not just yet. You’re the third person in the last year to reach us in one of those antique contraptions, and I can tell you with some authority that you’re going to feel pretty terrible for a little while.” She grasps the railing at his bedside and leans over, inspecting him critically for a moment. “I’m Dr. Brasch, this is Dr. Lesedi. You’re in the Transitional Care Unit at Preservation Station Medical, and you’re going to be with us for a few days. Dr. Lesedi will be coordinating your care. When you’re nearing discharge, a social worker will come help you sort out applying for refugee status, finding accommodations, things like that. For now, your only job is to recover from cryo-sleep.”
He nods shallowly to indicate that he understands and lays there in silence while they go over MedSystem’s readings. He takes his own inventory: he feels as though he’s been pummeled by several very angry people; his skin still stings like he rolled around in a vat of needles, his stomach has calmed down marginally but is not at all happy, and he can track his pulse in the throbbing of his head.
After the doctors confer, Dr Brasch leaves. Dr. Lesedi seems friendly, so he decides to test the waters. “May I ask a question?”
“Of course,” he says, spinning toward the bed with a welcoming smile.
“Is it…is it true that medical care is free here?” He doesn’t actually believe that part of the information on this polity, and he should be okay if he’s right, because he concealed currency cards inside some of his least valuable (and least likely to be stolen) possessions. His crate was supposed to be shipped with him, so if everything went as planned, it’s already here waiting for him to claim it. If not, he’ll have to hope it won’t take forever to work it off.
Dr. Lesedi’s smile falters again, but only briefly. “It is. Food, housing, clothing, medical care, all provided by the polity. You can trade work-hours, services, or possessions to go beyond the basic allowance for the others, but all necessary medical care is provided without trade or barter to everyone, even visitors.”
He absorbs that for a minute. The fog is starting to roll back from his mind, and he’s making connections again. “Does everything being done for me qualify as necessary?”
“It does,” the doctor replies slowly, then shakes his head. “I apologize, I’ve never had a patient just in from the Rim before, and your questions are surprising to me. Let me give you a more complete answer: anything medical staff or MedSystem do or offer is necessary care. If you wanted that little scar on the back of your hand removed, you’d need to trade for it, because it’s not limiting you in any way. But ensuring you recover from suspension sickness is entirely necessary.”
“I see,” he says, having no reason to disbelieve the doctor but little capacity to believe anything so incredible. “Is it all right if I ask you one more question?”
“Ask as many as you like.”
“The other doctor said there were two others who came in suspension boxes. Do you happen to know what happened to them? Did…did they both live?”
“They did. I didn’t work those cases and couldn’t tell you much more than that even if I had, but yes.”
The relief is more intense than he’d expected. He’d never know if all the boxes he’d repaired had done their job, but three had. Two people besides himself, successfully removed from…whatever they had been so desperate to flee that they’d climbed into one of these antiquities. It has to be, he thinks, the most worthwhile thing he’s done in his life.
***
This planet is beautiful. He’s been in residence a month now, and he still finds himself stopping in his tracks almost daily, gobsmacked by the sight of something completely new and his own great good luck. Today, what has caught him on his way home is the sunset, spreading purple and orange across the western sky, the university buildings and, beyond, those of central Makeba forming dark silhouettes against the ribbons of color. And between them and all around him, the trees, reaching exuberantly for that particolored sky, leaves whispering in the hot summer breeze.
There are so many trees here, so many plants in general. Every house has a food garden, the roads and walking paths lined with ornamental foliage, the flat roofs of public buildings given over to small-scale agriculture, every twentieth urban lot reserved for little public parks with riotous swathes of native plants. Makeba lies near the equator, on a sprawling, roughly triangular expanse between the planet’s largest ocean, a wide river, and an endless-seeming sweep of rolling, rocky hills that had been a mountain range before millions of monsoon seasons eroded them into friendlier terrain. This land had been a jungle when the humans arrived, and they hadn’t altered it nearly as much as they could have.
He’s adapted to the heat with relative ease; he attended five years of university on the desert planet below the station he’d grown up on before and worked on after. The sheer amount of life here, however, was and remains a constant astonishment. He’s been surrounded by people often—too often—in his life, but here he could be the only human in sight and still be merely one of many living creatures. As he stands entranced by the sunset, his peripheral vision catches arboreal mammals leaping from tree to tree to roof to comm-relay and onwards, birds and insects winging against the humid air, other creatures visible only in the ripple their passage sends through the ground-level foliage. And here in the city, so close to the university, there are many people, too, going about their business or their pleasure, smiling and waving and calling out to one another. The people of Makeba seem to smile as easily as they breathe, another daily marvel in this bewildering new life.
“Ah, the first purple sky of the summer,” someone says, close by. “The monsoons will come early this year, it seems.” He turns his head and meets the smiling gaze of Dr. Lesedi, standing almost at his elbow. “Hello, Mr. Gurathin. You’re looking very well.”
“Um…hi,” he replies, face heating at being caught staring at the sunset as though he’d never been on a planet before. “It’s a surprise to see you down here.”
“I transferred to the urgent care between the university and the port last week,” he says with a vague hand gesture to the south. “Today wasn’t a great day, so I thought I’d treat myself to a drink at place I frequented in my med school days. Would you care to join me? I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.”
He’s completely off balance now. “I…uh…is that allowed?”
Dr. Lesedi’s expression is rather bemused. “Sure. I’m not your doctor anymore.”
Gurathin hesitates only a heartbeat before he nods. He’d become accustomed to the easy friendliness of these people someday, he supposes. “Lead on, then.”
“It’s just a few blocks down here. My given name’s Jonen, by the way.”
“Mine’s Teo.” He looks sidelong at his unexpected companion, noting the slight slump of his shoulders, the distant cast to his gaze. “May I ask why today wasn’t great?”
He grimaces. “Some university students were fooling around in a chemistry lab and set off an exothermic reaction. Five of them were burned, which we could handle. They won’t forget that pain anytime soon, but they’ll completely recover in a physical sense. One of them, however, also lost an eye. There’s nothing we can do about that but prevent infection and leave them to decide if they want to go forward with one eye, or replace both with a vision augment set. Either way, their life will never be the same again. All for a moment of foolishness, and theirs was probably no greater than the others’. They were just less fortunate in the consequences.”
He may not know how to react to unexpected friendliness, but bad things happening? That, he’s familiar with. “That sounds upsetting. I know it’s always frustrating when I can’t make something work in my job, and I’m just mucking about with machines and code. No one’s depending on me to fix them.”
“I love what I do, but when something happens that we can’t stop or reverse, when I can’t help as much as I want to, it’s hard. And today those five kids came in screaming.” He shakes his head. “The burns, you know. Took us a bit to get them anaesthetized and start the tissue regeneration protocols. I’ll hear it in my dreams tonight, I’m sure. And see it. Burns are unpleasant.”
Gurathin remembers the only time he’s seen burned human flesh up close. Another tech had deliberately introduced a bug into a release she’d been packaging for deployment. When she was caught, she’d admitted she’d done it to bring her supervisor’s numbers, and his bonus, down. The whole department had been made to witness her execution. When four SecUnits had simultaneously fired on her with energy weapons, her body had more or less exploded. Some unidentifiable part of her had landed within centimeters of his right foot. If he thought about it too long, even years later, he felt he could still smell the charred tissue. “I would imagine so,” is all he can think to say.
“Anyway, enough about that,” Jonen says firmly. “How are you settling in? It’s been, what, six weeks since you were discharged? Seven?”
“Closer to seven. I stayed on the station for a little while, but when I accepted a job with the university it made sense to move down here. It’s been, and continues to be, quite an adjustment, but largely a good one.”
He smiles curiously. “What’s been the biggest change?”
“The food,” Gurathin replies swiftly. “I never had the income for fresh food, it was all nutrition bars and meal-pacs. The closest thing I’ve seen to a meal-pac here is a covered dish assembled less than a day ago. I’ve even started learning to cook so I don’t spend so many of my work-hours on meals.”
That’s been another huge adjustment—the lack of currency. When you want something that isn’t part of your basic allotment, you either give the provider something you have that they want, like the time he fixed a vendor’s portable display in return for the cardigan he’d been admiring, or you spend work-hours (or fractions thereof). Work-hours are just what they sound like: a digital representation of hours worked, tied to your feed ID. And they’re the same for everyone. An hour of his programming, or Jonen’s life-saving medical interventions, or a kitchen assistant’s vegetable chopping are worth exactly the same. It’s a fine argument in favor of doing what you want to do, that’s certain. And the laws around minimum rest periods and personal time have created a pretty narrow band of differing—he supposes you could call it ‘wealth’—between the outer boundaries of those who work as much as they’re allowed and those few who subsist entirely on the basic grants.
“I eat out too much, too,” Jonen replies wryly. “I seem to recall you said you were a systems engineer. Is that what you’re doing at the university?”
Gurathin makes an equivocal gesture with one hand. “They have their own techs for system maintenance, and didn’t need anyone there. I did a fair amount of software development for my previous employer, and I’ll be doing bug fixes, upgrades, and new plug-ins for the university’s homegrown academic software packages. They’ve built almost everything in-house, which is wise. They could have bought most of it from software companies faster and cheaper, but it would have been riddled with spyware. The most senior developer is retiring at midsummer and with the university expanding, a slowdown in software improvements could have significant effects on research. So I came along at just the right time, lucky for me.”
“And for them, it sounds like.”
“I hope they think so.” Then, for no reason except that his companion seems truly interested in what he’s saying, he voices a thought he’s been toying with but hasn’t yet shared with anyone. “When the fall term begins, I’ve been thinking of starting on my doctorate. I wanted to when I originally got my education, but my contract-holder wouldn’t allow it. A master’s was plenty to get to work with.” It’s odd, to think of doing something like that purely because he wants to, because he enjoys learning, and not because it will advance him in his career or earn him money. It might open doors to different and possibly even more interesting work one day, but that’s all.
Jonen’s smile is filled to brim with approval. “Life is short, so do what makes you happy.” He leads them around a corner and gestures up the street to an establishment with a large patio full of tables out front. It looks popular. “There it is, The Whirling Dervish. It’s a restaurant as well as a bar, and as I say that I recall that I didn’t even ask if you drink after stating that as my intention in coming here,” he adds wryly.
Gurathin smiles a little, nodding. “I do, as it happens. It was a luxury I didn’t often indulge in, however, so feel free to make recommendations.”
“I’m a cocktail fan,” Jonen says with a grin. “I like the variety, and how cheerful so many of them look.”
“I’m only familiar with one cocktail, and I’ve only had it twice. It was delicious, though.” He’d treated himself to another the night preceding his departure, a final indulgence before he risked his life to leave everything he’d ever known.
“Which one?”
“The Last Word,” he replies.
“Hm, don’t know that one. What’s the base?” Jonen asks as they stepped inside. An attendant greets them from a station by the door and tells them it’s open seating inside or he can put them on the waitlist for the patio. They choose to sit at the bar, a wide sweep of polished wood behind which a middle-aged woman with a broad smile and a pile of rainbow braids atop her head jokes cheerfully with a cluster of young people who seem to be celebrating some sort of milestone for one of their number.
“The base was gin, I believe,” he answers belatedly.
“Well, if anyone on Preservation knows the recipe, it’s Andula there. The food is decent here, and they have a nice selection of beers and wines, but people come here mostly to have Andula or Jem, the other head bartender, mix up some magic for them.”
They're glancing over the menu on the nearest display when Andula walks up. “Jonen, love! It’s been too long!”
He beams. “I took a job up on Station for a year, but now I’m back. You’ll be tired of this ugly mug again in no time.”
She laughs. “And who’s your friend?”
He claps Gurathin on the shoulder and says, “This is Teo. He recently immigrated from the Corporation Rim and he’s just told me about a cocktail he liked there—the Last Word. Do you know it?”
She nods comfortably. “Sure do.” She turns her attention to Gurathin. “We only use Preservation-made ingredients here, so it won’t taste quite the same as what you had elsewhere.”
“Nothing in this system has been like what I knew there,” he replies with a shrug. “I’d like to try your version.”
“Same here,” adds Jonen.
She raps her knuckles on the bar. “Coming right up.”
As she squeezes a lime and reaches for several bottles from the shelves, Jonen says, “Might I ask you something that might be a bit personal?”
“Go ahead.” He hopes things aren’t about to get weird. It’s nice, sitting in this bustling place with someone to chat with. Someone who might become a friend? He has a vague notion that friendship is safer here, less transactional. Possibly deeper. It’s an intriguing and terrifying possibility.
“One of the first things you asked about was the people who came in those other suspension boxes. It only occurred to me after we discharged you to wonder if you knew them…if you’d been worried about them. Did you?”
“Oh. No, I didn’t know them. I was concerned because I’m the one who rehabbed the suspension boxes.”
His look of surprise is almost comical. “For your company?”
Gurathin chuckles. “Absolutely not. It was under the table work for some people operating out of the station I lived on. They acquired twenty of them, none of them functional, and by cannibalizing six and recreating some components outright, I got fourteen of them working. Theoretically, at least.”
Jonen rubs a hand across his mouth. “Wow. Well, we know three of them worked.”
“We do.” He allows himself another little smile. “I’m going to assume that success rate means most of the other eleven did, too.”
“Here you go,” Andula announces, setting two small glasses of pale green liquid before them.
Jonen raises his and says, “Cheers.” They clink their glasses together and take a sip.
It’s familiar and strange all at once. The bite of pine is gentler, the juniper and citrus taking center stage. The herbal flavor underneath isn’t quite the same, but it’s still rich and complex, leavened with sweetness.
“Damn, that’s nice,” Jonen says.
Andula regards Gurathin curiously. “What do you think? Is it as good as it was where you come from?”
“No,” he says. “It’s better.”