The Pride of Parahumans (6 page)

But then I remembered some minor thing that
she had mentioned.
Wait, you said something about "mom" and an
"old man Jerome", who are they?

The silhouette paused for a few seconds.
I'm a clone of Georgia Wolf, the Guildmistress of Guild Wolf.
Jerome Marquez is the Guildmaster of the Guild you guys are
paying.

"Does everyone on this rock have two names
like a human?" Cole threw in his own comment. The rest of us glared
at him for failing to remember that we were not speaking aloud to
preserve the secret identity of the part-time vigilante we had
here.

No, just those who are part of a clone
family have last names. Often it's the first name of the line's
founder but some, like my oh so imaginative mother, come up with
completely new names to add on to their own. Also many of the
Guildmasters have multiple clones, the SPPS gives them discounts
for some reason, I've got five sisters and Jerome has eight
sons.
The shadow that had saved our possessions and possibly
our lives then ran off back down the way we had been headed.

I walked over to the immobile rat still lying
there in the middle of the hallway. I thought I saw one of his eyes
twitch a bit. So I went up to his head and flipped my kilt up,
giving him a brief view of my featureless crotch. "I'm no 'missy'
you scumbag." I told him and then grabbed his left hand and started
pulling him back down the way we had came by his arm. Aniya came up
to pick up his legs a few seconds later.

We did as Olga suggested, we dragged the thug
up to the nearest agent of Guild Marquez and told him the story she
had given us. He entered the information into his wristpad, and
asked Aniya to see the gun. She produced it, he looked it over,
then handed it back satisfied that it was indeed an open source
design that could have come from anywhere. "You should have told us
you were armed." He informed Aniya after giving her the weapon
back. "We would have adjusted your rates accordingly." He then
bound the mugger's hands in zip-ties and injected him with the
antidote to the tetrodotoxin. We left before he fully regained his
mobility.

On the way back to our ship we bought a load
of feedstock for our on-board fabricator. Most spaceships intended
to operate more than a day or two out from a habitat had at the
very least a multi-material "omni-printer" that could make a
variety of items from a number of different plastics and metals,
even some basic electronics. There were even a few well-equipped
ships that had nanofabricators imported all the way from earth that
could construct anything from a pizza to the latest model of
augmented reality contact lenses. Us, we just had an omni-printer
with a couple of robotic armatures for assembling the parts as they
came out of the printer, and my lab had a chemical synthesizer for
automatically mixing whatever non-solid compounds we needed and a
variety of microbe cultures for producing biological
substances.

Cole elected for an exact copy of the
pressure dart gun Olga had given Aniya, I'd engineer a plate of
bacteria to make tetrodotoxin to fill the darts with. Denal of all
things wanted a Chinese longsword with a stylized pair of
procyonid's paws on the hilt, I didn't think he even knew how to
use a sword but I queued it up anyways. Myself, I decided on two
weapons, a spring-loaded stiletto of the type where the blade
popped straight out of the hilt rather than flipping out, if I got
jumped like that again I figured I could pull it out and slam the
side of my fist into the mugger and pop the blade into his flesh,
and a gun. A number of designs were now public domain so I selected
a steel semiautomatic handgun that dated back almost two hundred
years but seemed to still be popular. I assembled many of the parts
myself but allowed the armatures to make the bullets, filled with
gunpowder mixed by the synthesizer. As I slipped the finished
weapon into the printed plastic holster I now wore on my belt I
hoped that I would never have occasion to use it.

Chapter 6

We spent the next three days touring the
habitats in Vesta and asking people what they thought of the
present situation on their asteroid. Many told us that the
Protectors had drastically reduced the crime rate, and some other
immigrants from different asteroids stated that dealing with them
was preferable to most of the governments they had previously lived
under. We weren't accosted by anyone else, though whether that was
due to the Guilds keeping the criminal element under control or to
the weapons we were now openly carrying I do not know. Regardless,
I got the impression that many of the people we asked weren't
telling us everything.

Eventually, we pieced together the story of
Vesta's controlled anarchy. After the revolution, the inhabitants
of Vesta, which had extensive mines and worker barracks but minimal
supervision, decided to embrace the concept of no rulers. The
nutrient algae vending machines were hacked so that anyone could
add their biometric data to the system and receive a daily
allotment of calories from the machines. The fabricators were open
to use by anyone who felt they needed something. If there was a
shortage of fabricator materials or some of the life support
systems began to malfunction or the algae went bad someone would
fix the problem. If someone went crazy and started killing people
they figured that an angry mob would drag him to the nearest
airlock.

Inevitably this turned out not to be the
case. Air scrubbers crapped out, leaving entire sectors unlivable
at a rate that overwhelmed the few people who had the initiative to
fix them. Infected algae were ignored until the food became toxic,
and psychopaths found ways to murder people with no witnesses to
form mobs.

The tipping point came, ironically enough,
when some people who were concerned about the degradation of the
habitat organized and began working to fix the various problems
full time. This group, known as the Repairmen's Guild, initially
suffered from a lack of manpower to resolve all the broken pieces
of the habitat, until they came up with the idea of offering their
members extra food rations. At first, this extra food came from
algae trays and hydroponics farms maintained by the guild itself
and voluntary donations from grateful civilians. But as time
passed, they needed more and more workers, and many Guilders
assigned to collect donations started using physical force to
intimidate people into giving up their food. This led to many
people becoming malnourished, and some resorted to stealing food
from others. During this time, the Protector's Guild formed, and
refused to aid anyone who didn't "donate" to them, and even more
people starved as a result of them taking yet more of the food.
Some people tried to avoid giving away their rations by offering
resources they had mined, items they had fabricated, or services
they could provide. After some initial incidents, the Guilds
decided that they would accept payments other than food rations,
which convinced many people to find things that they could
produce.

Eventually, so many people were producing
products and performing services that they formed guilds of their
own and began exchanging products or services for those produced by
others besides the Repairmen and Protectors. At some point people
started giving written promises of a future good or service
instead: "This file is redeemable for one kilogram of carbon from
Phil" and such. And then people began to trade these promises
around. Unfortunately they were easy to copy, and there were
disputes as to who had the valid file.

One group noticed this phenomenon and noticed
that many other asteroids used qcoins that were nigh impossible to
counterfeit. They obtained a set of quantum servers and formed a
guild that began trading promise files for freshly mined qcoins.
The issue of starvation was largely solved. Many people even
started growing plants imported from Earth or raised small animals
for sale, increasing the general food supply, though the algae
vending machines remained open for those who could not afford other
foodstuffs.

Despite all this, theft remained a bit of a
problem. The focus had just shifted from algae rations to other
products they couldn't afford but still desired. Thus the
Protector's Guild expanded until their organization became unwieldy
and was divided into several smaller guilds.

As great as the system that had emerged
spontaneously from the chaos was, there were still some problems
evidently.

***

"What do you mean by 'We can't buy from
you'?" Denal demanded from the representative of the Marquez
habitat's industrial fabrication guild. The red panda was
practically in the rep's face leaning across the desk.

"It's guild rules: We can only accept raw
materials gathered by one of the miners or chemists guilds," the
mixed breed dog parahuman replied, nonplussed by Denal's particular
way of asking him questions.

After deciding that Vesta was, in fact, safer
than most of the other asteroids in the immediate area, we bought a
long-term coverage contract from the Marquez Guild and set out to
find uncommon minerals in the surrounding rocks. After a week out
in the black, we came back with a load of tungsten, a very dense
and strong metal used in a lot of heavy-duty construction work.
Normally we could get a decent price for it, but now we were
finding it a bit difficult to offload on the locals.

"And just why can't you accept ores from
independent miners?" Denal propped his drooping upper body over the
desk with his arms as he asked further questions that I was sure
would not get us closer to making money from this particular
venture.

The dog stuck behind the desk paused for a
few seconds as if having difficulty thinking of a good reason for
the rule. "Well, for one thing, we don't maintain the equipment
needed to determine the purity or even identity of the product. The
miners' guilds do."

Okay, now I was feeling a little offended. "I
analyzed that ore," I threw out before the bureaucrat in front of
us. "It is ninety percent pure tungsten. I guarantee it."

He turned slightly to face me. "And what is
your guarantee worth, madam, er, sir, er…?"

I hate it when people don't recognize that I
have no gender. "I'm pretty sure the word is "zir", I'm neuter. And
the name is Argentum, like the metal."

"Yes, well, Argentum, is it? How do I know
that your assessment is accurate without certification from a
guild? For all I know, you're lying outright about the contents of
those containers that you and your colleagues want to sell me."

I grabbed my head in my left hand and started
rubbing my forehead in exasperation. "At least the Ceres
Directorate had their own mineral composition team," I mumbled to
myself at what I was sure was a barely audible level.

Denal pushed himself up off the desk and
started for the door. "So, what, we should try selling to the
miners' guild instead?"

"No, I think you misunderstood me," the
fabricator's rep said. "The guild as a whole doesn't buy materials;
they only license and certify. You have to join the miners'
guild."

***

As we left the office Denal and I noticed a
large animated advertisement on the side of a building. It showed a
view of the city around us, but the buildings were decayed, like
they hadn't been maintained for decades. It seemed deserted. A
caption stated "VESTA, 2300 A.D." Then a figure in a pressure suit
was seen walking down an alleyway; his species was indeterminable
but appeared primate in origin. He walked into a house. The
interior was covered with dust that he left a shuffling trail
through. Entering the bedroom one noticed a bluish metal parahuman
skeleton, with the distinctive skull of a feline, lying on the bed.
The figure picked up a wristpad the skeleton was wearing,
dislodging the remains of the owner's hand and sending the bones
clattering to the floor.

The figure flipped his visor upwards to
examine his prize, revealing the furless face of a human being.
Words appeared at the bottom of the display and began to move
slowly upwards, "EVERY YEAR, HUNDREDS OF PARAHUMANS DIE FROM
VIOLENCE, EXPOSURE TO HARSH ENVIRONMENTS, AND DISEASE. UNLIKE MOST
SPECIES, WE CANNOT REPLACE THOSE LOSSES WITHOUT TECHNOLOGICAL
ASSISTANCE AND CONSCIOUS EFFORT. OUR PEOPLE ARE HEADED FOR
EXTINCTION."

Then scene began to shift, subtly at first
but becoming clearer and clearer. Dust vanished, broken shelving
was restored, and burnt-out lights came back on. "BUT WE AT THE
SOCIETY FOR THE PRESERVATION OF PARAHUMAN SPECIES BELIEVE WE CAN
REVERSE THAT TREND." Finally, the human picking over the bones of
long-dead parahumans disappeared, and the skeleton was replaced by
a sickly-looking, but live, panther. Then the door opened, and
another panther who could have been a copy of the one in the bed,
just healthier- wait, not healthier, just much younger- came
through, carrying a tray of foodstuffs. The old cat smiled as he
saw his clone (for surely that was what the other feline was)
placed the tray on a cabinet next to the bed, and pulled up a
chair.

Then the scene shifted to a factory setting,
a row of cylindrical glass tanks with robotic arms within that laid
flesh and sinew over metallic bones inside the tanks. It panned
over to a tank with a nearly complete male red fox suspended in the
tank while a team of technicians and another male fox, this one
with grey hairs spotting his fur, stood nearby. "OUR CLONES ARE NOT
MERE LUXURIES. THEY ENSURE A FUTURE FOR ALL PARAHUMANITY."

"Tugs at the heartstrings, doesn't it," I
said as the scene started to repeat before me. Denal nodded in
agreement.

"Hey, didn't that Olga Wolf babe say that she
was a clone?" I thought back to our first day in Vesta. She had
said she was a clone of the guildmistress of Guild Wolf, no less.
And there was something else…