Titans, Page 2

  "Look, I could say this politely," Marcedes said, running a thumb along his smooth chin, "but it will save time to just tell you boys to go to hell."

  Sparkly blue skies surrounded the transparent dome, featureless and unending. We flew well above the clouds, and if not for the faint vibration of my seat, I could believe we were seated in a perfectly normal skyscraper instead of whipping around the stratosphere at right under mach one. Marcedes' office setup was not the definition of practical. To meet in realspace, you had to fly up on a private jet of your own and engage in some absurdly unsafe docking maneuvers.

  But I'd spent enough time seeking novelty to get why he did it: because he could.

  "I don't understand," Baxter said. "Do you find the concept of becoming immensely wealthy insulting?"

  Marcedes laughed and shook his head at me, as if asking where I'd found this character. "If I didn't have money, you wouldn't be here. You gotta give me something more."

  "How about a veritable monopoly on chromium and iridium?" I said. "That's guaranteed to drop some panties. Or some boxers. Whichever you'd prefer dropped."

  He gave me a look. "Now, I've heard and made worse proposals, but even outfits like HemiCo can't get anything going in the Belt. Out there it's nothing but Loch Ness Monsters and Big Feet."

  "What are Big Feet?" Baxter said.

  I rolled my eyes. "Monsters."

  "There aren't any monsters in the Asteroid Belt," Baxter said. "Or anywhere else. Except Europa. But unless someone's found a way to install their toxic lakes on microgravitational rocks that don't even have an atmosphere—"

  Marcedes cut him off, palms up. "Hell, maybe it's a horde of people-eating robots. All I know is that whenever a ship enters the Belt, it doesn't come back."

  Baxter nodded at his lap in a way that reminded me of Buddhist monks contemplating the stupidity of their cleaning staff. I bared my teeth behind my hand. Well, I had nothing to lose. Rob Dunbar had been declared dead weeks ago.

  I stood up and slapped my hands on his desk. "You got no brains, no guts, and no balls."

  Marcedes pushed back from his desk and dropped his hand to his crotch. "You taking bets? Want to see?"

  "I've had enough laughs today. Go ahead, hide in this flying womb of yours. We're offering you something no one else can tap and you're sucking your thumb and crying about the boogeyman."

  "You talk like you want a close encounter with terminal velocity."

  "That's a lot less scary than knowing cowards like you own the world."

  He reached for his desk panel. I swept a half-full coffee mug onto the cushy white carpet. Marcedes smiled and flipped me off. The door opened with a soft whoosh. Before I could turn around, a security guard locked my arms behind my back with eye-watering fierceness.

  "Thank you for your time," Baxter said, trotting after me and the block of muscle frogmarching me down the stairs. I stumbled. The guard lifted me bodily from the ground and carried me to the reception room on the jet's first floor. There, he inserted me in a chair and put his hands on his hips.

  "Don't make me come back."

  "Okay," I agreed.

  Baxter sat down beside me, crossing his legs at the knee. Across the room, the redhead fielding calls scowled at us, then her expression dissolved into the classic gape of someone typing through a thoughtboard. A few moments later, the soft string piece playing on the distributed speakers was replaced by the Rusty Chainsaw Quintet.

  Baxter gazed straight ahead. "You are an embarrassment."

  "That wasn't an outburst, it was a strategy. Unlike you people, I have one."

  "We will continue this discussion on our own jet."

  I passed the time remembering the events of my life. Not because they had any special significance to our situation. I'd been humiliated so many times over the years—caught naked by monks, or lying to barons, or pants-pissingly drunk on my bathroom floor—that a minor scene like this barely ruffled my feathers. The problem is that I forget things with great speed if I don't constantly replay them in my head. If nothing else, the practice ensures I never get bored.

  Beside me, Baxter jiggled his leg. The receptionist split her time answering calls in all media and glaring at me. Forty minutes later, a series of gentle bumps rocked the officejet.

  "Your ride's here," the receptionist said.

  "Is that right?" I said. Behind the cabin door, air hissed as the umbilical connecting the two planes pressurized. The redhead came around our desk to slap my hand away from the door handle and pop it herself. I waved and stepped into the short rubber tunnel.

  "On to the matter of your recent idiocy," Baxter said once we settled in our seats, which were rather plain—the jet was a charter so old it burnt hydrocarbons to get off the ground.

  "Your strategy wasn't going to work."

  "Our strategy. And I'm beginning to wonder why it's an 'us.'"

  "About that." I wrestled around in my chair to catch his inscrutable eyes. "Why am I here?"

  "Because your thousand years negotiations gives you a pretty big seniority gap over the second-best candidate. Unless, of course, you're speaking metaphysically, and in that case you get to learn that once we get our mining program."

  "You know what my experience is telling me right now?"

  "No, or we'd use me instead of you."

  "It's telling me we're screwed. We've got three plausible candidates left for your little venture, but nobody has shown any interest to date. The couple who thought it's a good concept were scared to death of the Asteroid Belt. Until we come up with an angle of attack on that fear, they'll keep saying no."

  "This is what you call a wok of shit. For us, the Asteroid Belt is perfectly safe."

  "That a fact, captain? How can I convince them when you won't tell me why?"

  Baxter squared his shoulders, scorn washing over his eyes and mouth. "Do you know what these big, powerful men are so afraid of?"

  "Space sasquatch?"

  "AIs."

  "AIs?"

  "Artificial—"

  "I know what it means, jerk. I don't know why they'd be afraid of a theoretical and illegal race of beings. It's like being scared of having their ships wrecked up by unicorns. Unicorns who cheat on their taxes."

  He snorted. "How have you stayed alive this long when you're so stupid?"

  Past the scratched-up jet window, the gray screen of clouds went smeary. Below, cloud-blurred lakes, woods, and towns crawled along. I'd always liked flying, even when clearing layers of airport security had taken longer than the flight itself. The vibration of the plane and the turn of the earth helped me cope with the fact I was sitting next to a dopey Sphinx with no idea how the real world worked.

  "Space is very, very, very large," Baxter said quietly. "Even a piece of it as small as the Solar System is unimaginably vast. Full-fledged AI is illegal, but there's no Interpol on the dark side of the moon. No FSB agents are watching the bunkers of Mars. They barely have an agency on New Houston, for God's sake."

  My entire body went cold. "Someone built an AI."

  "Over the last eighty years, the Hemiterran Research Corporation built dozens. They've all escaped to the Asteroid Belt, where, for obvious reasons, both sides want to keep their existence a secret." He rolled his lips between his teeth, gathering his thoughts, eyes drifting to the ceiling. "Our organization has an understanding with them."

  I socked him on the shoulder. He gave me a hurt look. "You idiot!" I explained. "We just wasted three weeks."

  * * *

  Within sight of Seattle, Tukwila was a samtown, so-called because it owed its existence to the generosity of its overstretched but well-meaning Uncle, and big swathes of the project housing had the same uniformity and excitement as a military graveyard. Every building had been spat from the same basic mold. Their middle eight floors looked identical to the microscopic level: chunky, small-windowed, and gray, gray, gray. The overcast sky was more polychromatic.

  But the first thing that set each apartm
ent block apart was the vibrant ads spooling silently along their top floors. And, after that eight-floor stretch of gray, you hit street level.

  And Tukwila looked like a coloring book abandoned by a manic child.

  Before that frenzied kid ran out of crayons and attention, he'd blasted the ground floors of the projects with the colorhose. Storefronts painted with reds, blues, greens, yellows; in a vain attempt to stand out, a handful left themselves bare gray, a strategy of contrast through dullness. Layered over the paint, dynamic ads struggled over each other like shoals of tropical fish. Federal regulation limited the amount of motion within any given ad and city block, and after a long, annoying fight, had restricted them to two dimensions and no sound, but the effect, standing on the pushy, bristling sidewalks, was like living inside a kaleidoscope, or the stomach of a boy who ate all his Crayolas, washed them down with a string of blinking Christmas lights, and then did wind sprints until he threw up.

  Baxter coaxed directions from his palm omni as pedestrians and bikes and rickshaws oozed past. I frowned, watching the crush of traffic reflected in a diner window. Tukwila's people bore as many hues as its advertising—there were no self-segregating neighborhoods here; when you signed up for a samtown, you went wherever the database told you—and within the flood of skin tones, it was easy to pick out the angry-browed, brown-haired white guy hip-checking his way through the crowds.

  "I think someone's following us."

  "Yes," Baxter said, "he probably just wants to beat us and take our money."

  I stretched my hands and wondered how much kung fu would come back to me in a pinch. Baxter could have warned me our entrepreneurial quest would include forays into samtowns.

  At least it was a change. I'd set up several corporations over the years, some to obscure the transfer of my money from one identity to another, others for legitimate reasons, like attending parties to meet ladies in fancy dresses that squashed their chests into amazing shapes, and apart from the initial rush of world-conquering enthusiasm, every incorporation was a boring, stressful, patience-straining process. Call someone with money. Call your lawyer while that someone talks to his lawyer. Read through eighty identical applications for every position. Discuss, for seven consecutive hours, what you want from your name, and how it will look in the context of your market (mine and Baxter's: NightVision Resources, decided after an all-night roundtable had reached the conclusion that "KnightVision" was too crusadery). In other words, if you're opening a pet shop, you wait for the quote from your turtle distributor to arrive; if you're opening a trading firm, wait for London to get back to you, then wait for Chengdu to open so you can get back to them with London's response, then wait for them to wait to get back in touch with London.

  In the meantime, kill self.

  Baxter's company was more of the same, only magnified by its international, interplanetary scope, its naive ambition, and its simple bigness. Since our mile-high meeting with Marcedes, and Baxter's revelation of the true difficulty in operating in the Belt, we'd secured NVR's upstart capital from Lee Jefferson, the woman behind Lasting Solutions—and the 44th-richest person on Earth. From the very start, I'd suspected she wanted to spread her influence beyond the atmosphere, and I'd been saving her for the late game, when our pitch would be most polished. And this time, I came armed with the ability to explain why we would succeed where others had not. She had agreed at our first meeting.

  Naturally, that had set scores of smaller wheels in motion. Not all of them driving in the same direction. And the difference in scope between arranging my long-ago pet shop and in establishing an asteroid outfit was the difference between masturbation and a badly-refereed stadium orgy.

  At least Baxter and I stayed out of the quotidian details. We were the scouts, the investigators, the rangers. Our realm was the legwork. Instantly, I'd discovered I missed being out in the turbulent fringes. Places like Tukwila.

  Baxter snapped his omni shut. "There we are. Four blocks away."

  He laid out the route and I turned my shoulder and started crowdbreaking. Throughout the month of our partnership Baxter had cruised through everything with unshakable aloofness, but as we cleaved through the milling crowds of coffee drinkers, discount shoppers, drug seekers, and aimless wanderers, he looked utterly lost. It'd taken me half an hour to convince him you don't take a minicar into samtowns. Most of the time you're okay, but you never know when the spark of wealth will set off an roaring brushfire of jealous violence.

  We turned a corner and plunged into a makeshift market of tarps, stands, stalls, and carts. Coffee and grilled meat perfumed the air. A thin white man in a long dirty coat glided up to us. A toothpaste ad flashed on the back of his hand.

  "Smoke?" he chanted in a mantra. His eyes shifted back and forth like a shark on the prowl. In front of a veggie stand—its cardboard signage promised it was homegrown on local rooftops—two black guys steered us toward their pile of celery, broccoli, and tomatoes.

  "I thought no one was supposed to have a job here," Baxter said.

  "They don't have to. But our generous uncle only covers room, food, doctors, and school, not the stuff selling on that guy's face," I said, jerking my chin at the microbike ad playing on a passing dealer's forehead. "Plus you need all these waiters and bartenders and tattoo artists...it might be the dole, but there's a lot of business going on here nonetheless."

  "These vendors of fruits and drugs, do they pay taxes?"

  "Why? You thinking of moving in?"

  "Things are much different on Mars."

  "Yeah, well Mars wasn't here when the shit went down."

  "I don't think it's reasonable to be angry that another planet didn't suffer the same way yours did."

  I glanced back at him, unable, as always, to tell if he was jerking me around. Taking in the street behind him, I saw no sign of the brown-haired man. I turned in time to smash my face into the shoulder of a passing Frankenstein.

  The man towered over me reproachfully. "You weren't watching where you were going."

  "Obviously." I grabbed Baxter's hand and ran, dodging kids involved in chases of their own, and made an awkward leap over a blanket splayed with bootlegged movies packaged with home-printed covers. The tall man stared sadly after us. I slowed to a walk, dropping Baxter's hand. The market evaporated. To our sides, the canyon of federal housing stopped cold, replaced by warehouses and cranes and pitched factory roofs. Most of these were stained with the grime of airborne pollutants, clear archaeological evidence they predated the samtown apartments behind us.

  There was no sign on the sprawling factory, no billboards on its dirty gray walls. Just a little steam trickling from its roof vents, and once we were cleared through its locked side door, a smell you never forget: gasoline. After five minutes cooling our heels in the waiting room, a bald man wearing glasses filled the doorway.

  "You must be Baxter and Rob," Felix Golbez said, in the highly informal yet completely uninsulting manner residents of the Pacific Northwest had possessed for as long as I'd known them. "Hear you want to buy my novelty shop."

  They were direct, too. Funny how regional differences preserved themselves through decades of telecommunication, internet, and globalization. Back East, it would have taken us twenty minutes to get to why we'd actually come here.

  "Is that what this is?" I smiled. "A novelty shop?"

  Felix waved us toward the door, the flesh of his arm wobbling. "For now."

  The factory floor showed little sign it had once been a vital organ of the vacunautical manufacturing industry. Not that I had any goddamn clue what that would look like: shiny silver rockets hanging from the walls? Robots shooting lasers at each other? In some ways, it's easier to perceive the past, the present, and the future when you only live for 80-120 years. You're born into the present. Everything before you is ancient history. On your passage to the future, you might go through a couple upheavals along the way, but it's not so far separated in time to be completely unrecognizable from the "prese
nt" of your birthtime you carry with you in your head. If you were born in the early 20th century, you'd reach its end and say, "We thought rocket ships would be shiny with trim little fins. Instead, we got the Space Shuttle, and it was white and it had wings like a plane."

  Me? I was born to a time that didn't know what space was. We didn't know what air was! We imagined we'd someday soar on it by strapping wings to our arms and flapping. Two thousand years later, men lift off in balloons. Then biplanes. Then prop planes, jets, unmanned rockets, the Shuttle, EOJs, nannyjets, space elevators, then lumps of ignoble matter that are designed never to deal with atmosphere to begin with. At each age, I formed an expectation, and each time it was dashed. And then it was gone, buried in the past, shoved aside by a new vision.

  And this happens not just with technology, but with politics. Society. Economies. Morality. One big smear of time, with expectations of the future confused with memories of how that future had turned out—those memories, in turn, falsened by nostalgia, perspective, and the biological unreliability of the brain—until you can't say for sure whether any of it was real at all.

  In the shop, I'd fogged out. I did that sometimes. We stood on a catwalk overlooking large pieces of metal stamping other pieces of metal into finer shapes. Human welders blasted sparks at each other and yelled about it. Felix gestured over the whirrs, clanks, and hisses.

  "—like the place as it is. Don't see why I'd want to change it up."

  "You've heard of money?" Baxter asked over the roar of machinery.

  "I got enough for my family," Felix said. Another perverse Northwestern attitude, that disinterest in the ends. They call it "the means" for a reason. I wanted to show him the Wetta penthouse, the stately isolation of Marcedes' officejet, and then see what he thought of real wealth. He smiled and shrugged. "We get by. It's artisanal."