The Transhuman Comedy

We left the north dock of the New Ruidoso arcology about ten in the morning. The brown terrain, scuffed by low brush, flowed beneath our aircars. The jagged paired peaks of Mesa Doble loomed on the right and the autopilot took us close enough to see the strata of pale and dark rock striping across the mesa.

"Far enough?" Derome asked from the trailing aircar. Our aircar projected his voice to sound as if it came from behind us.

Our aircar also answered his question, 14.8 km, but I turned my head anyway to pour the data into deeper parts of my brain and the aircar obliged by blocking my eye's view of the cabin's back wall with a camera-collected view through the air behind us. Derome's aircar, like ours an aerofoil cabin with two lifters mounted on forward, chicane nacelles, had passed Mesa Doble. Behind the mesa, fading in the haze, New Ruidoso climbed, its jagged profile formed of sharp edges, a mimic of the mesa. They said New Ruidoso's architecture showed respect for the natural landscape, but at that moment it seemed to mock it with its size and its straight lines. Inside our relatives and acquaintances dreamed in Virtual, tended by machines, sheltered by buckytube walls.

"Far enough," I said.

Derome's aircar yawed a bit and then sped up. He'd already punched the hacked-up override. "Race you to the river and back!" he shouted as he passed us.

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posted by Raymund  # 6:14 AM 0 Comments

Eric climbed down the dropship's ladder and jumped off the last rung to the surface of the flowing lava. The cryocompressors in his boot soles hardened the molten surface and his newly-formed raft of igneous rock bobbed on the glowing lava lake. Vaporized helium flowed through tubing up his legs and lower back and radiated heat out of his suit's angel wings.

He had not thought of Anjara for a few weeks but he thought of her now. He remembered how she arched her back and sucked in breath through her teeth when he licked her labia and clitoris while his fingers stroked her G-spot. He remembered the moss-green couch and the retro brick accent wall in her apartment and how she and he sat over wide deep mugs of coffee and plotted his conquest of the world of xenogeology. Here he was, six and a half years later, leading the expedition to the magma wells of Beta Comae Berenices III-B, hated by older scientists like Geli Munday and her cohort, envied by his socially-inept peers. He was only here because of Anjara.

He froze in place but his mind swirled. He clung to the primary research questions to anchor his thoughts. Did tidal forces caused by the primary planet and the other moon explain B's still-molten core? Did the pillars of translucent komatiite date back to the moon's origin or a later impact event?

I'll never forget you, he'd said, in a last desperate attempt to make her stay out of pity.

She must have rented the worldweary expression and tone of voice from some marketer of personality traits, because he knew then and now Anjara had none of her own. The half-life of memory is seven years, she replied.

He had never cried after she ended their affair and he needed to. He needed to cry, to honor his memories of their time together and to redeem the years of byzantine academic intrigue and emotionless hookups since then. The realization rushed on him and his suit stiffened to assure his balance. His suit telltales, displayed inside his faceplate, showed his heart rate and blood pressure in their yellow zones.

Cry now, tears to be captured by the expedition's data stream? And let Geli Munday and his other enemies whisper mockingly about him in the corridors of the institute's xenogeology department?

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posted by Raymund  # 10:54 PM 1 Comments

Lt. Harrell finished his pre-flight walkaround of the dropship. The left hind tarsal claw showed some reentry blistering but otherwise she checked out. Harrell reached for the rope ladder to climb up but hesitated. SOP gave dropship pilots three hours turnaround time during an Orbit-to-Surface Round Trip and he might as well use it. The setting sun lit the puffy edges of low cumulus clouds
and a brisk breeze rustled across the lifeless rockstrewn plain. Within the square defined by the shield generators, the recon base showed as humps of buried shelters. Most of the six people based there would be asleep or on duty
wrangling their robots, but someone might be at liberty to swap stories over cups of moonshine.

Mr. Redmon spoke in his mind's ear. --Lieutenant, is your bug physically unable to perform?--

--No,-- Harrell replied, quite consciously leaving off sir. He could chauffeur the civilian without repecting him.

--I ordered you to shove off as soon as you did your post- and pre-flight checks.--

Harrell stared past the humped shelters toward low tan hills five miles away. --SOP calls for me to give a surface base CO one hour to bundle and load packages for return to the flagship.--

Through the link he felt Redmon seethe. --Lieutenant, while I am dirtside I am the commanding officer of all I survey. Now get your ass upstairs or I'll fill your life with more bullshit than a Texas barnyard. Do you roger me?--

--I roger you. Mr. Redmon.-- He turned his back on the base, scaled his bug's thorax, and pulled the rope ladder into the cockpit after him. He tapped the controls and the bug jumped on its springy legs, pushing Harrell into his
seat. At the top of the jump the minidrives kicked in, pushing him deeper and filling the bottom of the window views with spilling yellow-white light. He turned the bug toward the sunset and his orbital insertion and wondered what kind of bribe to the dropship group's XO would free him from returning to pick up the civilian.

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posted by Raymund  # 3:37 PM 0 Comments

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posted by Raymund  # 4:38 PM 0 Comments

Beta Comae Berenices had risen, but that only made conditions worse, Gib thought. Under the yellow sunlight, vapor steamed out of the open holes in the ice, cloaking the surface in a thick fog. Outcroppings of magnetite thrust jaggedly out of the pack ice and spoofed the scanner on Gib's airscout with false leads. Every kilometer, Unité observation towers stood on three spindly legs, but the sensors running around the circumeference of each tower's circular top deck had been designed for warmer planets and gave unreliable data.

Even if the impediments magically disappeared, the odds were high (p = 0.91, the airscout's Bayesian system guessed) the artifact had impacted too hard and smashed against a magnetite pillar or plunged through the pack ice into the sea below. This was a fool's errand. Gib slowed the airscout and left it hovering while his mouth contorted and he shook his head at the futility of the search. He turned the stick and upped the throttle to head for home.

"Monsieur Pauli asks that you continue the search," the airscout said in its cheery alto voice. "He will continue to pay you 125% of expenses, plus time spent."

Gib hovered again. M. Pauli knew the odds were against finding the artifact, but if he were willing to spend more money--

--The artifact must be worth a lot.

"I'll be glad to keep searching," Gib said. He pushed the airscout forward at low speed and tasked every spare cpu cycle on stripping magnetite ghosts from the scanner data.

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posted by Raymund  # 3:55 PM 0 Comments

The sky above the city was empty this morning. All the spacers at liberty and slumming bobos slept late after their debaucheries the night before. L.X. throttled down the thrusters on the runabout and levelled off above the city. The rooftops, slabbed and angled like the offcuts at a giant's stoneworks, stood like an archipelago in a sea of morning haze. The haze and smooth surfaces veiled the inner workings of the city, where crimes against nature could be indulged in the flesh and, for an added price, the chirurgical vats and neuroanatomical programmers could strip those crimes' evidence from body and mind. OKIN tolerated the free port, aware of the needs satisfied therein and confident its gates and scanners could contain the city's excesses and preserve the narrow-minded serenity of the realm beyond.

L.X. patted the black leather messenger bag on the seat beside him, sipped hot green tea, and dove to meet those waiting for him.

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posted by Raymund  # 11:08 AM 0 Comments

Tof pressed his nose against the ship's window. Outside lay a rock-strewn desert out of ancient Arizona or Alpha Centauri IV. "Isn't it neat?"

Gerber banked the shuttle. They flew low, below the tops of the natural spires of khaki basalt rising above the plain a few hundred meters apart. Flying between them left his augmented reflexes unchallenged. "It's a marginally habitable moon."

"But Grand-Orb is so close! You can see its clouds and count its rings!"

Gerber sighed. "It's a ringed gas giant. The galaxy is full of them. This trip is just a milk run. It's the antisense of wonder."

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posted by Raymund  # 6:17 PM 0 Comments

"Papa, Papa," Luc said from within the tall flechettegrass. "Come see!"

Irritated, Henri turned away from the virtual press officer of the pro-Unité rebels. The sere yellow grass thinned out and he felt heavier as he returned to full verity. Across the living room, Luc stood at the picture window, his fingertips resting on the plasma pane, his posture showing him raptly watching something in the tunnel. Probably a maintenance robot, 1200 meters away on the far side.

"Papa, come see!"

The boy was too young for his brain to be nanolinked with the Communité Télépathique de l'Unité, so Henri could not send a ganger across the room to his son. He could let a concierge guide his body over while his attention remained in virtual, but the boy was old enough to see through that. Tell the boy no, he thought, but then he remembered As the Unité is to its people, so should parents be to their children. He heeded the CTU's wisdom and crossed the room.

"The worldship is giving birth to triplets!"

What did he mean? Then Henri saw the childish logic. The drydocks lay many kilometers to the left, past twists and turns, somewhere deep in the worldship's core; the tunnel was a birth canal and its blast doors a dilated cervix. If three ships came down the tunnel, they must be small ones, tenders or light patrol craft. Henri rested his hand on the boy's shoulder and looked up.

Gooseflesh stippled his neck and cheeks. The three ships were Oleastri-class cruisers, saucers half the width of the tunnel, bristling with weapons and sensor arrays. The conversion drives were throttled almost to zero, glowing dull red instead of white hot, with conduction and convection impossible through the tunnel's hard vacuum; even so, Henri squinted and the plasma shimmered when the ships passed. Luc yiped and pulled his fingertips away, but his gaze remained rapt. "They're so big!"

"Yes, son."

"What kind of people are in them?"

Henri sensed the crews through the CTU. Nodes of thought pulsed within and between the ships. "All the sorts of people of the Unité. Verities, uploads, cyborgs, robots, ais."

Luc's head turned to the right after the last cruiser. "Where are they going?"

"I don't know." In his mind's eye, Henri saw only stock images of space battles and support operations for ground forces. "But I know they will defend us from the Tiánquán Republic."

They stood in silence for a moment. Pride in the Unité welled in Henri's chest, perhaps an odd thing to feel looking onto the empty tunnel. The plasma pane deexcited, but what had set it off? A power surge? He'd have to call maintenance again.

Luc looked up. "Papa, what did you think of the triplets?"

Triplets? What was the boy imagining? Well, he wasn't even linked with the CTU. Let him enjoy his imagination while he could. "I liked them very much."

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posted by Raymund  # 2:50 PM 3 Comments

Lini halted her steed and drank from her water tube. Four Archeaopteryx wheeled overhead, but obviously in a courtship flight. They hadn't found the missing pilgrim. A wasted hour in the midday rays of Beta Comae Berenices. Ride around Swift Hill and then back to the settlement--

Cols lifted its sleek blue head and peered beady-eyed to the right. Its nostrils snuffled the air and it made a caw-caw-caw-cawwwk sound deep in its throat.

Lini turned her head. "Boy, what do you see?" Her gaze roved the hard packed sand with colors swirled like a marble cake. Her gray plastic baroquehelmet swept a magnetic field through her occipital lobe and subtracted out the heat shimmer. A rippling black shape lay eight hundred meters away on the next slope and she realized the black ripple was the pilgrim's robe in the breeze. The pilgrim lay motionless, face up, on a stratum of sand red-brown like dried blood.

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posted by Raymund  # 12:16 PM 0 Comments

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posted by Raymund  # 1:31 PM 0 Comments