Freenet (16 page)

“Are you there, Simara?”

“Right on your pretty-boy ass. Keep your head down.”

“Are we falling?”

“Like a shooting star. Keep your head down.”

No sound. No wind pressure. No landmarks. It seemed as though time and space had stopped for Zen, and a feeling of calm soothed his jangled nerves. This wasn’t so bad.

“You’re developing a spin,” Simara said. “Deploy your drogue chute by pressing the blue button on your inside forearm, left side.”

Zen followed her instruction and heard a popping sound near his feet. The horizon continued to tilt. “I don’t think it’s working.”

“No air yet,” Simara said. “You’re deployed, don’t worry. I’ve got you in view. Your chute’s starting to drag a bit. You’re doing great.”

The Cromean horizon continued to skew upward and then disappeared from sight. All he could see was an expanse of stars like sprinkles of confetti in black eternity. No troopship, no planet, nothing at all. His gut coiled like a serpent. “I don’t think it’s working,” he repeated.

No reply. No visual reference but the tangled skein of a distant galaxy. He felt frozen in time, floating free in endless space. Completely still.

Warmth wafted down on his cheeks from above, and his skin prickled with panic as the temperature increased. Soon he was sweltering and sweaty in his tomb. The heat steadily mounted to incendiary levels. Was he burning up, flashing out? Were they dead already? “Simara?”

The sound of her gasping breath came from someplace far away, laboured in distress and irregular. Was she dying? “Simara?”

“We’re not fucking there yet, Zen. Shit. You’re coming around. Keep tight.”

He hugged himself like a turtle and trembled with fear in a fiery alien hell as white mist obscured his view, turning pink and then red. He could sense no gravity, no movement, nothing at all but the searing heat. His thoughts seemed lazy and stupid as his brain succumbed to fever—like trying to slur speech from sleep during a nightmare. One breach in their suits and they would be cooked meat—two burnt birds coming in on the night. The twinned sound of their wheezing breath became a dancing storm in his ear, and he had plenty of time for regret, plenty of time to pray to Kiva. The mottled crescent of Cromeus appeared through hissing mist, and a thud jolted him as his ablative shield blew away and his second drogue chute deployed behind him. The horizon cartwheeled as drops of sweat spun from his chin.

“Woohoo,” Simara shouted. “That must be terminal velocity. Get ready to fly.”

Zen thought of dino-birds in the mountains of Bali pushing hatchlings into the air, forcing maturity on them like any good parent testing their genome. He had seen the brittle bones of the weaklings in the foothills.

“You’re in a flat spin,” Simara said. “Stick out an arm and try to work something. The wind is your friend.”

Zen tried both arms and bent his legs. He writhed and twisted, but couldn’t find a target on the horizon. Nothing seemed to make sense. He closed his eyes against nausea and felt a blow on his shoulder.

“Zen,” Simara shouted. “Wake up and grab my arm!”

He flailed a hand and felt momentary purchase. He peered wildly for a glimpse of her as she came round another time. He reached for her and slapped onto her arm, but she slipped away. The horizon stabilized.

“Hold that form,” Simara said. “Can you feel equilibrium yet?”

A press of wind began to push against his chest like a force of nature from his grounder home. He learned from it, tested it, and found stability. “Yeah.” He studied the mottled brown of the surface as it crept perceptibly closer. “I don’t see any water.” No blue, no perfect squares of green, just wild land and dangerous terrain. “And those ribbons of cloud look ominous. Is that a storm?”

Simara grunted assent. “Life is for living.”

His paraglider deployed, pulling him up with a jolt like the hand of Kiva grabbing him by the groin, and he reached up to snag dangling handles.

“Showtime,” Simara whispered.

Zen struggled to plot his trajectory as a stormy gale began to buffet from the right. “That valley to the left,” he said. “There’s a small stream.”

“Got it. Good as any.”

“Where are you?”

“Just above. I don’t want to tangle in your lines. Find us a soft spot.”

The ground came up fast, too fast, and his chest tightened with alarm. He swung his paraglider against gusts of wind and tried for a snaking length of stream, but hit some underbrush and landed skidding on the shore as his chute tangled in the foliage and dragged him to a halt.

“Shit,” Simara said as her shadow passed. “Oww.”

Zen looked up to see her glider catch on a tree branch and slam her into a sharp ledge of granite. One side of her chute cut free and floundered like a dying ghost as she fell. She cried out in pain as she hit the rocky ground and rolled down an incline into a pile of boulders.

“Simara!” Zen struggled to fight against gravity—now suddenly dead weight on the ground like an armoured statue sunk in thick mud. He could barely bend a knee to move as he scrambled to disconnect his harness. “Simara?”

He ripped at the clamps on his chest and climbed out of his stiff robot body. He ran up the beach to her and found her twisted like a broken doll among the rocks. Her cracked faceplate was dark, her body unmoving. “Simara!”

Zen wrestled with the clamps on her spacesuit and reached inside for her warm body. No pulse on her inert chest, no signs of life. His eyes watered with frustration as he pushed against her rib cage, forcing plasma to move, hoping for a miracle. He tested her bones for breaks and checked for visible damage. He had to get her out of this mechanical crypt! He pulled her legs free one by one and hauled her from the orifice like a stillborn baby from an artificial womb. When her head came into view, he saw blood dripping from her nose and ears. No!

Zen wiped her face with the cuff of his sleeve and checked her throat for obstruction. Her teeth were all fine, and her gums free of blood. He blew a breath into her mouth and watched her chest rise. He pushed on her heart in quick pulse as her body deflated, then filled her with another breath, keeping the pace, holding fast to faith. He pulled the breathing tube from her crumpled spacesuit and took a rich breath of oxygenated air, then expelled it into Simara’s broken frame, over and over, pumping her chest with steady rhythm. Her throat rattled with phlegm.

A helicopter came screaming down the valley with twin searchlights and beat the air above as Zen worked at resuscitation. Waves whipped up in a froth on the river as the craft settled on pontoons and expelled two children onto the beach, a boy and girl dressed in plain cellulose, thin wraiths, perhaps teenagers at best. They rushed forward and fell on their knees at his side.

“Mothership has gone quiet,” the girl said. “It’s a terrible omen.”

“No,” Zen said and blew rich oxygen inside Simara’s limp body. How long had it been since she stopped breathing on her own? How long could she last before permanent damage? “How did you find us? Are you omnidroid?”

“Simara is our elder,” the boy said. “We’re always in touch with her.”

“Can you connect with her now? Is there no brain activity at all?”

The boy grimaced sadly and shook his head.

The girl held up a palm. “Wait. Fermi, did you hear that?”

The boy closed his eyes and peered up at his skullrider vision. “What?”

“I thought I heard something.”

Zen took a huge breath of air and blew it into Simara, forcing sustenance into her, pushing his luck to the end. What could these babies know about life and death?

“I heard that,” the boy said. “Did you hear that?”

“Mothership is back online,” the girl said with a squeal of delight. “She says to bring Simara to the helicopter.”

Zen wagged his chin. “She’s had a wicked blow to the head. She can’t be moved.”

The boy, Fermi, put his tiny hand on Zen’s shoulder with eerie confidence. “Bring her to the helicopter.”

Zen forced another breath of air past blue lips, and Simara coughed in reply, but he couldn’t tell if it was a last gasp of death or first hope of life. She was barely a feather-sprite in his arms as he picked her up and gently cradled her. He stumbled over rocks along the beach with his lips on hers, dripping tears on her tranquil face as he followed the children to the helicopter and climbed aboard. He continued a steady exhalation into her tiny body with faith and promise as they rose into the air and sped away over the trees. He would gladly breathe life into her precious mouth forever, never sleeping, never weary.

Roni knew how to tease meaning from the manic rush of the V-net, to distill it down to the news that mattered—that was his expertise as a media darling in New Jerusalem and anchorman for the
Daily Buzz
. And he didn’t go for all that talking-head virtuality crap or the pop-culture mayhem of the vidi slashers. He came to the office in person every day and sat in front of the cameras, blemishes and all. Roni had a creamy complexion, a full head of dark hair, and a secret weapon in Derryn the makeup boy who wielded pure genius with a brush, but it was content that drove his high ratings and big bonus bucks. He had a nose for news and prided himself on finding the real story behind the headlines.

He strolled into the newsroom to find five staffers busy at their terminals stroking the V-net feeds for daily drama like trawlermen checking their lines for a good catch. They had their thoughts plugged up on viewscreens to share internal visions with the team, and Roni watched images flash like lightning as their fleeting minds paraded the virtual landscape. “Did you see the one where the escaped criminal jumps into space from a crashing troopship and lives?”

His executive editor, Gladyz van-Dam, looked over from her thoughtscreen and pursed pretty lips. She wore her brown hair long and fashionably curled to her shoulders, a source of pride for her though she never appeared on camera. “Yeah, heady stuff. Made a six-point on the chart for a few minutes. She’s still in a coma, kind of a dead end.”

“What’s the real story?”

Gladyz grinned. “You know I love it when you talk dirty, Roni.” She arched her eyebrows in fake flirtation and began searching for data on the V-net. “The charge was murder, no details released pending jury selection.”

“Great, I love a good body count.”

“Oooh, get this, she’s omnidroid.”

Roni flinched. “Bummer.”

“Yeah.” Gladyz nodded. “Bad magic—probably why the first run didn’t mention it. She’s been working hard-life on the Babylon trade route. Strange place for an omnidroid.”

Roni sidled up and peeked over her shoulder. “Yeah, but a great place to get away with murder. You got any vidi on this femme fatale?”

“Not yet. Here’s a still.” She relayed a photo for view.

White spacer skin like fish flesh, blue eyes, dark hair cut short—pretty girl, but not a starlet. “She’s just a kid. What, seventeen, twenty?”

Gladyz chewed her lower lip as she scrolled through layers of data. She wore wide-lapel suits to work with skirts above the knee, playing the dignified executive for what it was worth and showing off great legs. She was a veteran production editor and directed the camera crew with a firm hand. “Hmm, no birth registry in the system. But you’re right, she does look young—like an elf.”

“A biogen with no date stamp,” Roni said. “Could she be from Earth, smuggled through the Macpherson Doorway?”

“I doubt it. The quarantine dates back over a dozen years. She would have been a baby at the time.”

“The Doorway is a sieve these days. Lots of genetic material gets through.”

Gladyz shook her bouncy brown locks. “But not a biogen—that’s the type of thing they’re most worried about, a genetically engineered plague or virus. Just imagine what a pandemic from Earth would do to our limited population base.”

“Okay, what do we have? An omnidroid of unknown origin, a mystery girl charged with murder and left behind on a crashing troopship. Makes me tingle all over.”

“I love it when you tingle. You want to work with it? There’s an accomplice. A Bali boy.”

Roni nodded in appreciation. “Even better. Where’s he holed up?”

“Bedside vigil. New Jerusalem West. You want me to scramble a crew and summon Ngazi?”

“No, leave the freak out of this for now. We’ll let the first run fade and throw the dogs off the scent while this one ferments like fine wine. I want this under wraps and exclusive. Give me a day to get the real story.” Ngazi was an autistic savant who provided emotional colour to the wirehead feed for the feelie users. He had no natural capacity for language, but his brain had overcompensated from birth with an increased ability to engineer digital emotion. Roni didn’t like to bring Ngazi in too early on his feature stories, and meant no disrespect with the office moniker. “What else do we have?”

Gladyz splayed a hand to her thoughtscreen. “The escaped orangutan is still on the loose. It’s getting political, tagging on the omnidroid scandal.”

Roni smiled at the synchrony of his universe. “Perfect lead-in. We’ll call it the
Hairy Ride
.”

Gladyz van-Dam shrugged. “You’re the man.”

“And you’re the best. Let’s wreck this world.”

Gladyz raised her hand up for the customary palm slap of promise, and Roni gave his editor a grand smack. They had a good working system based on mutual respect and compromise. They trusted each other to keep strict confidence while they ferreted out the truth, brainstorming ideas and feeding off the energy, and they put on a grand public spectacle six days a week on all public channels—the
Daily Buzz
.

Roni ambled into the makeup salon while Gladyz primed the studio crew. The famous orangutan was biogen, and researchers were testing for signs of psychic ability—all very bad-boy amid persistent rumours that the omnidroids had developed precognition. Nothing better than controversy to pump the pipe on the newsfeed, and this one had good scare factor—no one would buy lottery tickets or invest in the stock market with omnidroid mindreaders on the loose. A deal-breaker like that could alter the equilibrium of power and ruin the digital economy, but he’d tag on the controversy with poetic licence and hint at conspiracy to set up his next feature story, all part of the media game. News was for exploitation, and Roni was the best in the biz.

Derryn the beautician made quick work of Roni’s strong features and firm jaw as the first script began to trickle in on Roni’s earbug. Lots of interesting stuff today, not just celebrity crap. A blight in the northern wheat fields was giving corporate critics fresh ammunition in a call for biodiversity of the food supply. A motion had been launched again in parliament to give voting rights to cybersouls in storage, a move that could shift significant economic influence to a group of eternals who were technically dead. And, for lovers of body culture and the Way, a cooperative symphony was being conducted based on the galvanic skin response of participants connected to sensors in the auditorium seats, some type of flash musical experience.

Derryn was a true artist, gay in every sense of the word and a continual source of ribald humour for all the staff. He called Roni his “little masterpiece,” hinting at bigger things to come and claiming to have seen a few contenders. He had a deadpan delivery and a knowing wink that might have made him a star onstage, but today his jokes fell on deaf ears as Roni continued to ruminate about Simara Ying—the little omnidroid pixie niggled in the back of his mind like a bitter seed caught in his teeth. Why the hell would Transolar leave an accused criminal on a doomed troopship? No room in the lifeboats? Or perhaps they were multitasking as judge, jury, and executioner! Either way, Roni would nail sympathy from a sophisticated audience and dangle accusations for juice while he pranced on the public stage at his editor’s direction. Gladyz was no slouch. The whole team was a collective work of art—a creative gestalt in which innovation arose out of interaction.

They spent four hours putting together a twenty-two minute show, then shot it live in the studio with Ngazi and the full crew—traditional, timely, with the cutting edge of reality that made all the difference these days. Social netcasting was a big challenge, and Roni took it seriously. Relationships were what drove the news, motives and motions in the background, causes before effect. He wanted to know
why
the news was happening before he expounded on the when and what. He wanted to taste the bitter edge of tragedy, smell the stench of treachery, and relish in the sweetness of hard-earned exultation. And the groupies—whoo-boy, Roni loved the ladies despite Derryn’s charms.

He bagged the
Daily Buzz
to applause from the staff and complimented the best van-Dam crew in the business with a nod to Gladyz and blind-faced Ngazi. They were all expert professionals who loved media culture in their bones and blood. As Roni was fond of repeating like a mantra to anyone who would raise a flagon of beer with him at the Dog and Hoar after hours: “Life is for living, and the net for sharing—long live the news!”

Today Roni skipped the pub meeting after work and took the overhead tram downtown to chase down his story. He settled in his seat and searched through virtual data on the back of his closed eyelids, where he found V-net reference to twenty-four more omnidroids, biogenic relatives to the pixie girl, Simara Ying. They were all very young, teenagers or less, which seemed reasonable for new biotechnology, but two had recently been killed in a freak accident—a helicopter crash! Roni could feel his red news-nose heating up in the fog with Santa on the way. Two omnidroids doing a short hop out in the sticks on Zuloo Island got caught in a surprise storm and drowned in the sea when the chopper went down. Seven crewmembers miraculously survived and were found floating in a lifeboat. The transport company, Redikit, was majority-owned by Transolar Corp., the big boys.

Bingo.

There was his lead story blaring in his brain: a mysterious conspiracy against omnidroids foisted by the biggest interplanetary transportation conglomerate in the three worlds! A hint at homicide, a thread of possibility—that was all he needed to fling some feces in the air on the
Daily Buzz
.

New Jerusalem West Hospital was a majestic spectacle in the sun, all glass and gold to reflect the heat and protect the underground corridors where lives were saved and families preserved. Roni flashed press credentials at a security cordon inside, but didn’t specify his reason for visiting. He already had the room number from Gladyz and didn’t want to draw any attention from media vamps or paparazzi. “Just background stuff,” he said with a celebrity smile and nonchalant wave as he sauntered past the guards to the elevators. The narrow hallways downstairs were cluttered with supply carts and wheelchairs, but the medical staff seemed calm and controlled as they coped with another day in the trenches. The place smelled of liniment and detergent, a sharp shock to the olfactory senses.

Roni found his target ward and poked in the open door to find the Bali boy sitting in vigil with muscular arms folded across a burly chest. A teenager sat in a nearby chair with his feet dangling above the floor, an elf boy with features much like Simara’s, perhaps a younger brother. No police in the hall, no sign of Transolar authority. “Zen Valda? I’m Roni Hendrik from the
Daily Buzz
. Mind if I come in?”

Zen stood but made no gesture of greeting. He was a handsome kid with auburn curls, well tanned and physically photogenic. Touching was a faux pas on Bali, and Roni was unsure of etiquette. He kept his hands to himself and peered at Simara Ying, asleep in her bed. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s okay,” Zen said. “No change.”

Roni nodded and edged into the room. The Bali boy looked haggard on close inspection, eyes dark, forehead grim. The elf child watched him with the steady stare of an empath, kind of creepy. “Are you a relative?”

The child studied him with intensity as though testing his aura or body magnetism or something weird like that. “Simara is the elder of our group. I’m Fermi.” He bowed with adult aplomb. “Honoured to meet you.”

“Thanks. Have you seen my show?”

“I’m watching several episodes now.” He pointed to his forehead. “Very interesting.”

“Oh,” Roni said, “omnidroid.” He should have known the biogens would huddle together in times of trouble. “I’m sympathetic to your cause.”

The child barely blinked from his digital delirium, but at least he was a fan.

Roni turned his attention to Zen Valda. “I know you’re in a difficult situation, and I can help you both, even if you’re on the run from the law. There’s no better place to hide than in plain sight on the news. No one can try anything funny with a thousand eyes looking on.” He offered his camera smile, but got little response from the Bali boy. “You’re a hero, you know, rising from the underground, protecting the downtrodden—people love that stuff. And the court will be supportive.”

Zen nodded with glum weariness as he resumed his seat. “She didn’t do it.”

“I believe you.”

“They tried to kill her.”

“I wondered about that.”

“They crashed the ship on purpose, just the way Simara said it would happen.”

Roni kept a mask of concern on his face while his inner soul danced with glee. Crash a troopship to kill one little elf girl? That was great copy for any editor. He could see it all—giant ratings, big bonus. “Any idea why?”

Zen dropped his eyes in the negative, but the child piped up: “They tried to kill us all and failed. In desperation they made a terrible mistake in trying to murder our elder, and that’s why you’re here to reclaim justice for all.”

Roni chuckled with affable humour. “Well, I’m just a newsman, but I’m sympathetic to your cause. There are a lot of mixed reports in the media, and some bad vibes on the sound bite. But rest assured I’ll tell the real story.”

The elf boy nodded again with eerie eccentricity. “Simara says you’re very good at what you do.”

Roni tipped his eyebrows up in alert to this fabled biogen telepathy. “Can she talk to you from her coma?”

“Mothership can hear her. The collective mind.”

Roni stepped closer to Simara. The dark-haired girl was quite exquisite in person. Her vidi pic did not do her justice. A light brush of pink showed on high cheekbones, and her pointed chin seemed firm and determined even in sleep. “So she’s in there? She’s not brain-dead or lost to oblivion?”

“She’s resting,” Zen said. “She’ll be back soon.”

The hope in his voice was tinged with tragedy, poor kid. A simple Bali boy flying in space with an omnidroid elder connected to a psychic mothermind! Man, what a story. “Where are you staying, Zen? Do you have anyone looking out for you?”