Cosmonaut Keep (4 page)

"Edgy tonight, huh?"

Her American accent is making me weak in the knees.

"No kidding." I plant my elbows on the bar and finger out a card. "What you having?"

"Cally Eighty."

I grin my appreciation of her good taste, and order two pints. "Let's take it easy," I say. "Play it cool. We're safe here anyway, but ... "

She eyes me across the rim of her raised glass. "Okay, cheers."

We lean against the bar and scan the room as though looking for seats.

"Bit crowded, too," says Jadey.

"Uh-huh," I reply. "Odd. It's only six o'clock, and the place doesn't usually get jammed until about eleven, our time. That's when the eastern U.S. hits five P.M."

"Yes. And?"

"Well, U.S. office hours are peak time for legacy system problems. Keeps our old guys busy most of the afternoon and evening."

"Thought programming was a young man's game," Jadey says wryly.

"That was in the old days," I say, still idly examining the pub's clientele. I hope that's how it looks, anyway. The old crowd are in far earlier than usual, and so are the new crowd, the young managers; and more of each than I've ever seen in the place at the same time. "Still is, in a way, for the sort of stuff I do. But programming as such is so tied up with legacy systems that it's practically a branch of archaeology. Even the new stuff is something you can keep pace with past your twenties. You've heard of Moore's Law?"

She shakes her head, outstaring some geezer who's looking at her a bit too long.

"Not surprised," I say. "It was the projection that processing power got twice as fast for half the price every eighteen months. That curve went flat a long time ago." I laugh briefly, taking in the sights. "Just as well, or this lot would be as gods."

"Scary thought," Jadey agrees. She looks into her pint, looks up. "Can we talk?"

"Hmm," I haw. The pub's secure, that's its selling point -- they put electronic countermeasures in the dust -- but I'm not feeling very secure myself.

"You got some reason to be here? Apart from what I want, that is."

"Yeah, sure," I say, realizing she isn't being paranoid. Tradecraft: Always have a legit cover story. I idly ramble on for a bit about the ESA contract, then --

"Wait a minute," I tell her. I've finally caught the eye of the guy I seek, and beckon him. Jason, long and lean, black-clad, hottest cardsharp in the city, picks up his drink and sidles over. "Let's get inside a game."

The three of us amble over to the only vacant games-table and pull on gloves and glasses. The table tunes in and suddenly becomes much broader and a faint, undecided gray. The rest of the pub becomes abruptly remote.

"What game d'you want?" Jadey asks, fingertips poised over the keypad.

"Quantum Pool," says Jason.

Jadey clicks the choice, and the table shimmers to green. The air becomes smoky, layered thick under a low ceiling. Slow light illuminates the pool-table's green baize and colored balls. Outside that light, close by, in a bar that doesn't much resemble the one in the Darwin's Arms, the barmaid is chatting to one of the men who leans or perches at the counter. Somewhere a games-machine jangles, and on a jukebox Jagger sings "Sympathy for the Devil." A little farther away -- if you look along certain angles between gaps in the walls and partitions -- is another bar, another pool-table, other machines and women and men: the place goes on, repeated as though in mirrors. No windows; but there are doors. Beyond one of them, as though through the wrong end of a telescope, is the real bar we're in. Beyond the rest are bars which I hope are fake, but they add to the authentic Old World atmosphere.

I reach under the table and pull out the Schrödinger box, within which a virtual cat's virtual life is at the mercy of a randomizer linked to a decaying isotope somewhere out there in the real world.

"Dead or alive?"

"Dead," says Jason.

The cat is definitely dead.

"Your break," I say, closing the box. I slide it into its slot under the table. Jason chalks his cue, leans across, sights along it, makes the break. A couple of greens and pinks collide, and each scatters into six blues.

Jadey laughs. She's leaning on something, probably the back of a chair, which the virtuality software has painted up as a garish, brassy bar counter. Jason straightens his back and looks over at her.

"So," he says. "What's your problem?"

She rubs her hand around the back of her neck. "I need a new passport, and new ID and an exit visa. Like, fast."

"Ah." His eyes narrow. "You CIA?"

"If I was," she says, "do you think I would tell you? Or need you to work for me?"

He shrugs. "A deniable non-denial. That'll do me."

It won't do me; in fact this whole question bothers me a lot, but I keep my mouth shut for the moment.

They dicker over the deal's details and the spec while I set up my first shot. I move the cue too fast -- almost as fast as the slow light. The Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction shortens the tip by a foot and I miss completely.

"Damn."

Jason swoops over the baize, leaving me in a tricky position, but not quite irretrievable.

"Why's everyone in so early?" I ask.

Jason grunts. "All the transatlantic connections have been very choppy today."

"Yeah, tell me about it," I say sourly.

"And not much bloody work coming in."

"Aha," I say, chalking the cue. "Interesting."

I pull off a neat relativistic shot: allowing for the contraction, slamming the cue ball hard, cannoning one of the small, light ultraviolets so fast that its mass increases enough to shift one of the greens, which does a slingshot around one of the corner-pocket black holes and sets up a few other balls it collides with to snooker Jason's next ...

But he manages a comeback and clears me off completely.

"Again?" I reach for the Schrödinger box.

"Nah." He shakes his head. "Gotta work. Mind if we stay in here for a bit?"

"No problem."

Jadey ducks out into the real world for another round. Jason flexes his fingers. A long, low table trundles through one of the virtual doorways and comes to a halt beside us just as Jadey returns with our pints.

"Don't put them down there," Jason reminds her, just in time. The big table, conjured from his own softwear, can stop his data-gloved hand, but ours -- and any other real-world object, of course -- would just pass through it. Jadey places the drinks on the real games-table and we watch Jason work. He turns for a moment, frames Jadey's face with his fingers, then places the resulting portrait on the flat and begins morphing it: from passport photo back through employment ID, graduation pic, prom, grade-school group picture, baby ... Other cards and pictures pop up on the surface of the big table, and he shuffles and slides them around with expert speed. Before our eyes a whole new biography of Jadey comes together, from maternity ward to tourist ticket. He sweeps them up into one stack, taps the edges on the table, and makes them vanish up his sleeve.

Dismisses the table and turns to me, with a broad wink at Jadey.

"Time to make it real," he says. "One for the code-geeks."

Old programmers never die. They just move over to legacy systems.

They even look that way. Early adopters to the last, they don't pop telomere tabs and mitochondrial mixers like the rest of us -- no, they have to try out untried biotech, so they tend to look a bit patchy: gray skins-and-smooth beards sort of thing. Jadey, Jason, and I circle cautiously around the edge of a raucous, twenty-strong clot of the old villains, all quaffing beer and talking at the tops of their voices.

"What's with the fucking news?" someone's saying, shaking his head and blinking hard. "I can't get CNN, can't even get Slash-dot ... "

This particular clique aren't all programmers. Sometime half a century ago, back in the nineties, their social circle overlapped that of the Scottish literary intelligentsia. Neither group's fashion sense has exactly moved with the times. The writers wear variously distressed jackets in fake-prolo denim or fake-macho leather; the coders go more for multipocketed waistcoats laden with the hardware for hardware fixes -- Gerber and Leatherman multitools, Victorinox Swiss Army knives, Maglite torches, and over-faded trade-fair T-shirts: Sun, Bull, HP, Oracle, Microsoft ... This isn't irony, this is advertising -- not of the products or the companies (most of them long gone), but of the skills, not at all redundant, of hacking their legacy code.

I try to look respectful, like some fanboy at a con, but I don't respect this lot at all. The ruling Party considers them unreliable, but as far as I'm concerned this is just the CPEU being its usual stuffed-shirt self. Vaguely left-wing, precisely cynical, they affect a laid-back, ca'canny approval of the so-called "imported revolution" that followed our defeat in the war. It was their kind of crap attitude to quality control that let the Russkis past NATO's automated defenses in the first place.

On the other hand, if you want to hack Unix-based filing systems in dusty metal boxes in schools and hospitals and personnel departments all over the continental U.S., they'll get on your case without asking questions, especially if you pay in dollars. I zero in on Alasdair Curran, a tall nonagenarian with long white hair and boastfully black sideburns.

"The guy who trained me worked on LEO," he brags loudly, "and he was trained by a some spook who'd been at Bletchley Park, so I reckon -- "

"Yeah, Alec, and you're still shite!" someone else shouts.

As he rocks back in the general laughter Jadey catches his eye, and I take the opportunity to catch his ear. "Got a minute?"

"Oh, sure, Matt. What you after?"

"Well, I need an MS-DOS subbie -- "

Curran scowls, then jerks his thumb at one of his mates. "Tony's your man."

" -- and Jason needs somebody with a bit of early-dialect Oracle."

"Ah!" Curran brightens. "That, I can manage."

"We need it, like, now," Jadey tells him.

"Now?" He looks regretfully at his pint, then back at Jadey. She hits him with her best smile, and he has no defense. Hey, it makes my face warm, and I'm not even in the main beam.

Back to the quantum pool-room, but this time we don't even pretend to be playing. Curran boots up some clunky VR database manipulator, Jason sets up his card-table again, and I call up some of my software agents to handle the interface protocols and break the American firewalls.

I get the uncanniest sensation of pushing at an open door. Within moments Curran's up to his elbows in U.S. admin databases, Jason's slipping unlogged updates on Jadey's life story, and I'm keeping the one and only record of the changes and my AIs are booking the new ID an airline ticket.

We back out.

Jason passes Jadey a plastic card.

"That's the lot," he says. "Take it to any copyshop, they'll print and bind it for you. It'll even have the right bloodgroup stains."

I'm shaking my head. "Too bloody easy. It's like all the U.S. codes had been cracked ... "

"Shee-it," says Jadey.

Then I remember too. The English resistance network, unraveling.

"Uh-oh."

Curran's looking at us sharply as we move back to his lot's side of the room. "What's up?"

"Oh, nothing," I say hastily.

Then I notice that the whole place has gone quiet and everybody's watching the telly wall. There's that little jazzed-up flourish from "Ode to Joy" that precedes official announcements, and Big Uncle's face appears. CPEU General Secretary Gennady Yefrimovich normally looks appropriately avuncular, jovial, with an underlying solemnity. Right now he just looks insufferably smug.

"Comrades and friends," he begins, the translation and lip-synch software maxing his street-cred as usual in all the languages of the Community. For this particular nation and region, he comes across speaking English with a gravely Central Belt Scottish accent, which I know for a fact has been swiped from old tapes of the Communist trade-union leader and authentic working-class hero Mick Mac-Gahey. "I have an historic announcement to make. The exploration station of the European Space Agency,
Marshall Titov,
has made contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life within the asteroid 10049 Lora."

He pauses for a moment to let that sink in. As if from a great distance, I hear a dozen dropped glasses break, in various places in the pub. He smiles.

"Let me first assure you all that this is no cause for alarm. The alien intelligence is no threat to humanity. These organisms are extremely delicate, and would be vulnerable to attack or exploitation. It is fortunate for themselves and for us that their first encounter with humanity should be the peaceful explorers of the Socialist Democracies, and not commercial companies or military forces."

Something about the ironic slant of his bushy eyebrows gives the message that he's carefully not saying anything that might give offense to the imperialist exploiters, but that we all know whose companies and forces he has in mind.

"Needless to say, we warmly invite the closest cooperation with the scientific agencies of the entire world, including the United States. Great vistas of cooperation are opened up by this astonishing discovery. I now turn you over to the regular news for further details, and wish you well on this historic evening."

Sign-off, with another flourish of trumpets.

Fade to black, with
something
in the middle of the screen ... and then I recognize some of it and the scale of the rest of it hits me.

I've got chills like water's running down my back; every hair on my body is standing up, and I'm thinking this is the biggest news in human history, this day will be remembered forever. I'm staring at the wallscreen, transfixed like everybody else by the images from space; 10049 Lora looks like a lump of clinker, the space station a tiny filigree on its side. I manfully resist the rising impulse to give a nervous giggle.

"Aliens?" I hear myself squeak. Jadey turns around, almost spilling her pint, as everybody starts yelling at once. She drags me bodily away to a table, past old code-geeks whooping and cheering or, in some cases, just staring slack-mouthed with tears welling in their eyes.