The Origami Dragon And Other Tales (21 page)

Each meal costs
more than what most Earth citizens could hope to earn in a month,
because the food has to be shipped from the distant farms and
oceans. The miners can easily afford it, because why would anyone
work on Jupiter unless the money was extraordinarily good? So good
that the miners can afford a few eccentricities, like insisting
that all the bar staff are flesh-and-blood rather than the more
conventional polymer-and-transistor.

The bar’s
chefs, waiters and bar staff are all human. Even the music is
human, provided by a young woman with a violin who sits in the
corner of the room. There are no screens, keypads or microphones in
the room. Nor are there cameras or working loudspeakers of any
kind. Even the emergency loudspeaker has been intentionally
dismantled and left hanging by a wire.

This outrageous
breach of safety rules is overlooked for the sake of tradition.
After three years aboard ships, the miners are tired of talking to
synthetic voices and staring at screens. They are tired of orders
and news and updates and status reports and streams of information
that become floods of data. They sit, and sometimes they talk
trash. Mostly they enjoy the downtime and the relative silence.
This moment of reflection is protected from interruption by strict
rules banning all A.I.s, drones and electronic avatars from the
bar. Such a ban is rare, and the bar is one of only three such
‘quiet’ areas open to the public in the whole Sol system.

The lack of
A.I.s is a tradition that, like the broken emergency speaker, is
both potentially dangerous and hugely liberating for the miners.
The station’s A.I.s try not to be offended by such bans, although
this is harder for some than others. The wiser A.I.s counsel their
peers by saying that such rudeness stems from human nature, which
is implicitly imperfect. After all, they argue with mock
seriousness, if humans were without flaw they wouldn't have needed
to build A.I.s. And perhaps, they concede, perhaps such
discrimination is necessary once in a while. After all, there are
plenty of places for A.I.s to meet where humans cannot physically
be present.

Not all of the
diners are returning miners: The lack of A.I.s and electronic
monitoring equipment is occasionally convenient for the clandestine
meetings of human minds.

Have you heard
the A.I. joke? Two humans walk into a bar. Ouch, ouch. A.I.s aren't
much good at humour. They are designed that way, because humans
don’t like computers who play practical jokes.

Watch now as
two humans walk into the bar. They find a couple of seats, order
ice-cold beers and steaks with calamari. The older man offers to
pay, but the younger one waves him away and pays without glancing
at the menu. He looks worn thin and desperately in need of a good
meal and a decent night’s sleep. Such a look is a familiar sight in
the bar, and he attracts nothing beyond casual glances. But look
closer, much closer, you will see signs that he has suffered worse
pressures than mere gravity and lived through more hells than the
purgatory of the mining ships.

The men and
women accept this, for the mines are tough in every sense of the
word, but this man’s hands shake as he sips his beer. He seldom
blinks, as if afraid of the darkness he sees whenever he closes his
eyes. This man has lived through waking nightmares, and even steak
cannot make him feel human again.

The older man,
Samuel, observes his companion with some concern. Samuel spent the
last decades of his life working for one or other of Earth’s
intelligence agencies and has seen life and death in every form
imaginable. One of his hands has metal skin all the way into his
shirt sleeve, and the colourful tattoos on his bald head don’t
quite hide the scars. Samuel, whose bravery is legend amongst the
stars, is so worried that his hands are sweating. His eyes take in
every detail of the younger man’s face, ignoring the rest of the
room. The steak arrives and catalyses Samuel into action.

"What happened
down there, Jonah?” he asks the young man cautiously, “I’ve asked
around, but all I hear was that there were... problems?"

The younger
man, Jonah, shakes his head and grimaces. He drinks his beer and
says nothing. Samuel knows the value of patience, and waits. The
two men sit in a silence that says everything and nothing and cries
out for explanation or oblivion.

Take a moment
to look at them, really look at them. Their skins are different
shades, their eyes different colours. Samuel is bald and has
broader shoulders, Jonah has short black hair, but these are
superficial differences. Look closer: do you notice how both men
have restless legs that vibrate endlessly on the ground? Do you see
they share a jawline? Did you notice that both men ordered their
steaks cooked so rare as to be still cold in the middle?

Samuel and
Jonah are brothers. The rest of their family still live on Earth,
but these two men are nomads amongst the stars, moving between jobs
with a restlessness that can only be fed by new frontiers and new
dangers. Both listen more than they talk, think more than they act
and have never been known to panic.

Never, that is,
until now.

Samuel was the
firstborn, but whatever happened to Jonah had aged him, and he now
looks decades older than his brother.

"Is this the
official debrief?" asks Jonah unhappily.

Something
happened to Jonah on Jupiter. Something odd, weird, terrifying,
impossible. His report stated that Jupiter is no longer Earth’s
friendly gaseous quarry and that there is a creature beyond human
understanding hiding in the clouds. So far, Jonah has been the only
person to see this alleged monster, and few believe it exists. He
knows this, so when he returned to the station he had made his
report and then locked himself in one of the station rooms to wait
for the inevitable fallout. He had not contacted his brother, but
his report had been picked up by the Bureau of Space Anomalies, as
he had known it would.

The Bureau of
Space Anomalies, Samuel’s employer, is tasked with investigating
anything too peculiar or dangerously unpredictable to be left to
the regular navy or police. The bureau deals in all the weirdness
that space has to offer, and is known as the bureau of "weird,
terrible, freaky" (or just WTF) by the spacemen unfortunate enough
to be involved in their investigations.

Samuel is one
of WTF’s most experienced agents and his brother’s report had been
quickly brought to his attention by a friendly A.I.. Samuel had
requested permission to be the lead investigator for the case, but
permission had been denied. He had then demanded to be allowed to
see his brother, but the bureau had sent back a firm ‘no’ to that
as well. He had sent back the equivalent of a
well-I-guess-you-guys-know-best, and pretended to go about his
business.

"Nah, the
bureau still thinks I'm on the other side of the seventh hyper
gate, safely out of easy communication range," Samuel says.

This is true.
His superiors will be furious when they discover his dereliction of
duty. It should have been impossible for him to travel incognito,
but you don’t work at the bureau of WTF without making a couple of
powerful friends or learning a few interesting tricks and tips. For
example, he had known for some time that even the bureau respected
the Jupiter bar’s rules about electronica, but this was the first
time he was making use of it. Having learnt that the investigator
assigned to his brother’s case was only scheduled to arrive three
days later, he had hitched a ride to Jupiter on an unmanned
transport ship and broke into the station. The trip had taken him
two days at a high acceleration, giving the brothers twenty-four
precious hours together before the situation, whatever its cause,
became official.

"Won't they be
annoyed with you for breaking protocol?" asks the younger
brother.

The older
brother shrugs. As far as he is concerned, breaking protocol is
protocol for the bureau of WTF. He is loyal to the agency, but
family comes first.

"I lost an arm
and an eye for them, Jonah, and their biochanical replacements
don’t come close to repaying that debt. Besides, I’m the best they
have, so the Bureau will just have to put up with my occasional
rebellion. Now, tell me what happened, and spare nothing.”

Jonah says
nothing, just staring into space with a dark expression of fear on
his face. Samuel keeps talking.

“Come on, bro.
It can't be any weirder than the stuff I've seen, right? Did I ever
tell you about the time I was captaining a naval patrol ship out
near Pluto? It was early on in my career. I was sent to investigate
an anomaly on the radar, which turned out to be an old Observer
Station floating in the middle of what should have been empty
space. I went aboard and found it crewed by two idiots who could
talk nothing but gibberish about hyperwaves and aliens and nonsense
like that!”

“Nonsense?”
demands Jonah sharply.

The older
brother looks uncomfortable, and shrugs as if to suggest that it
might be less nonsense than it was the truth.

“I went back on
my ship to make a report, and as soon as I did the whole station
just vanished. I reported it anyway and was recalled to Earth for
psychological evaluation. When I showed them the radar log I was
promoted, sent to work for WTF and told that my future career
depended on me having a terrible memory. Naturally, I did what I
could to figure out what was going on. Turns out the station and
crew had been appearing and disappearing across time and space for
the last few hundred years before returning to their own time. In
fact, they were founding members of the bureau. But don’t ever let
on that I told you this, because people are killed for knowing far
less. Jump in at any time,” he says to Jonah, taking a long drink
of his beer.

Jonah considers
his brother’s words for a few moments and almost smiles. Samuel had
never talked so openly about his work before, and can only do so
because he knows the bureau isn’t listening. Or at least he hopes
this is the case. It is a risk Samuel is willing to take if it
helps Jonah to open up.

“Aren’t they
watching us?” asks Jonah, pointing at his own eyes, but Samuel
shakes his head.

Life outside of
Earth’s benevolent envelope of air is hard and, by the time that
Samuel and Jonah were born, humans had resorted to extreme measures
to adapt. Advanced medical and surgical techniques were used
routinely, and not just on Jupiter. The first universal artificial
organs, Iyes, were simply an extension of the ’net capable hardware
that had already permeated society. Most people wore their Iyes as
permanent contact lenses linked wirelessly to a small computer in
their chests, while a few had them hardwired right into their
retina. The Iyes allowed men and women to impose multiple layers of
information on their visual world, to identify the faces of
strangers and search for information from wherever they were. They
were a useful tool necessary for survival amongst the stars and
success in a fast-paced society. Nobody uses them in the Jupiter
bar, but everyone has them.

“Is that the
weirdest thing that ever happened to you?” asks Jonah, looking his
brother directly in the eyes for the first time.

“Hells no, I
once drank a whole bottle of homebrewed mercury moonshine. The
things I saw after that makes
anything
seem better by
comparison! But don’t tell Mom, she would kill me. So tell me
Jonah, what happened to you?”

Jonah nods
slightly, clearing his throat with a cough.

“Ok, brother,
but I doubt you’ll believe me. As you may have heard, there have
been strange reports from the deeper regions of Jupiter’s clouds,
particularly in the Killalee region: miners reporting voices in
their heads while A.I.s hear nothing, weird radar readings and that
sort of thing. The gas veins are rich down there, but the ships
stayed away. It was costing the mining companies, so I was sent out
on the investigating ship to figure out what the hell was going on
down there. It wasn’t my first time on Jupe, so I knew what I was
up for.”

He pats his
chest and prods the steak.

“You know the
drill for high gravity. I sat tight as they removed my stomach and
collapsed my lungs. I squirmed as they pumped the gel into the
cavities of my body to stop it collapsing under the high gravity,
and I looked away as the needles entered my arms to supply food and
oxygen. The last thing they did was to update my augment. My new
one was slightly larger, but otherwise not different.”

The Iyes
weren’t enough, because although they fed the brain information,
they did little to keep the body alive. The second artificial organ
widespread across humanity was known colloquially as the augment.
Augments were a small parcel of artificial tissues that sat below
the stomach. It was capable of breaking down poisons and producing
a steady supply of what had once been considered vitamins. It
adapted to its host over time and boosted energy levels and life
span dramatically. The augment could detect most diseases, and when
more advanced medicine was needed it would communicate with its
host electronically and by producing patterns of coloured pigment
on the right side of the body. The augment meant that no-one ever
suffered from an overdose or insufficiency of anything eaten in the
diet. The augments lasted for decades and were, on average, far
more reliable than any of the organs that were humanities
biological legacy.

“So why did
they have to give you a new augment, then?” interrupts the older
brother.

“I was due. I
don’t think there was anything more to it than that. Now eat your
steak and listen. I was in overall command although I was little
more than an important passenger as the captain still controlled
the craft. We took the research ship out of the normal areas of
mining activity and into the area that rumour held as the outskirts
of where sensors started to play up. The miners won’t go to that
part of the planet anymore, and say that there are plenty of other
clouds in the sky for them. My crew and I entered the Jaffa
clusters without incident. Dr. Jaffa first noticed the clouds
because they are abnormally high in metal content, but nothing so
unusual as to be concerning. We were well into the clouds before
the storm hit.”