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“They were still only computers.”

That’s what I thought, cer­tainly, for a while.

My name is Jenny Cheng. I am forty-seven years old, and at the time this story begins I was work­ing in a cafe­te­ria pro­vid­ing the finest syn­thetic food to those few employ­ees of the Explorer Fed­er­a­tion unlucky enough to be posted to Free City.

The year was 3010, a full twenty years since I was forced to resign from my job with Diag­nos­tics Divi­sion on med­ical grounds. They sent me there, to a café, as far away from Jupiter Orbit as I could be. The fleet that I loved so much had long since departed for new hori­zons else­where in our unend­ing cos­mos, and I had only two regrets.

Firstly, that I never stood on the bal­cony of Jupiter Orbit on that momen­tous day in human his­tory, the day those three ships began their jour­ney with three mil­lion peo­ple on board and a fur­ther 80 bil­lion watch­ing from vir­tu­ally every screen in existence.

There was an offi­cial week’s hol­i­day, which gave me plenty of time to cry.

My sec­ond regret was Eliz­a­beth. Twenty long years of serv­ing food to bored mid­dle man­agers had given me a lot of time to think about that subject.

‘Dis­posed,’ that’s the word that kept run­ning through my head. I knew my depart­ment well enough to know that that com­puter couldn’t have been destroyed. They weren’t the types to dis­pose of some­thing that they could learn so much from. They would have taken that com­puter some­where, opened it up, and tested absolutely every­thing they could. And they wouldn’t have thrown it away in case they could get more infor­ma­tion out of it in future.

Which meant that com­puter was still around somewhere.

Just what was Bug #23691? Had we finally cre­ated a neural net­work so advanced that it had devel­oped its own intel­li­gence? Had that intel­li­gence noticed that we treated the com­put­ers with almost parental atten­tion and responded by devel­op­ing a child­like per­son­al­ity? It was ques­tions like these that twenty years of con­sid­er­a­tion had not answered. The only way to find out was to find ‘Eliz­a­beth A’.

Every time I con­sid­ered the prospect, it scared me.

Right from the early days of my upbring­ing, I was taught – as we all were – to be a con­formist. We were the peak of human achieve­ment, we could be and cre­ate so much, so long as we all worked together towards the same goals. I’d been posted here, to this café, and the sheer idea of strik­ing out on my own, trav­el­ling across half the solar sys­tem and break­ing into the largest ship­yard in exis­tence was ludicrous.

Man­ag­ing all that on my own – impossible.

But it turned out that I wouldn’t be on my own.

Lit­tle did Diag­nos­tics Divi­sion realise when they posted me here, but this poor cafe­te­ria wasn’t just used by the Explor­ers’ Free City branch.

Dis­si­dents had been a prob­lem in Free City on and off since the very begin­ning, or so they say. The fact that the news archives don’t men­tion them was pre­sum­ably designed to put off those think­ing of protest­ing against the Coun­cil, but even­tu­ally, once the poten­tials realised that the people’s sto­ries and the offi­cial news didn’t match, it had quite the oppo­site effect.

The secu­rity forces in Free City came in two vari­eties – those employed by the sta­tion, who took a very per­sonal inter­est in dis­si­dents, and those employed by the com­pa­nies them­selves, who couldn’t give a damn about any­thing besides pre­serv­ing their own contracts.

The sta­tion forces had such con­trol over both pub­lic and per­sonal spaces that it was not a good plan to voice crit­i­cisms of the Coun­cil or its prac­tices in any­thing other than a watered-down and vet­ted form.

Such crit­i­cisms were coun­ter­pro­duc­tive, they taught, for they only dam­age trust and do not achieve any good. This meant that the only even slightly safe places to speak one’s mind were the cor­po­rate enclo­sures where sta­tion secu­rity didn’t go – ones such as my café.

Secu­rity wasn’t tight there, since the worst a tres­passer could do against the com­pany itself was steal food or trash the place, and a sim­ple bit of bio­met­ric forg­ing would give any­one access. I noticed that on the first day, and warned the man­age­ment about the pos­si­ble secu­rity flaw. They ignored it.

It’s just as well that they did.

A few years ago, two new cus­tomers started com­ing for lunch on irreg­u­lar days. Their passes declared them to be José Emmanuel and Junko Iwatari, both lowly man­agers in the Explorer Federation’s Recruit­ment and Ini­tia­tives Division.

Despite their sim­i­lar posi­tions within the com­pany, the two couldn’t have been more dif­fer­ent. José was a care­free man who lounged back in his plas­tic din­ing chair as if it were a sofa and ate his food with­out cut­lery if it was at all prac­ti­ca­ble. His cloth­ing was def­i­nitely at the casual end of what the Explor­ers allowed their man­agers to wear.

By con­trast, Junko was a prim and proper young lady, the very image of what my own mother always wanted me to be. Her care­fully pre­sented exte­rior cov­ered a sharp mind, an equally sharp wit and a great enthu­si­asm for many subjects.

It took sev­eral months of over­hear­ing snatches of con­ver­sa­tion before the odd thing finally struck me — in all that time, they had not referred to their job even once.

After the café had closed one day, when they were the only remain­ing cus­tomers, I started chat­ting to them. Of course, they asked about my past and how I came to be work­ing there. I told them vague details of my job on Jupiter Orbit and my dis­charge, and I imme­di­ately seemed to spark their inter­est. At that point, though, I refused to say any more. Despite all the time that had passed, I still didn’t like talk­ing about it that much.

Since that evening, the two of them started com­ing more and more often, and reg­u­larly stayed behind after I closed up at the end of the day. Slowly, I found out about their back­grounds and what they did before join­ing the Explor­ers, and I even­tu­ally told them the full story of what hap­pened to me twenty years ago.

Their eyes vir­tu­ally sparkled with fascination.

I even told them what I had con­sid­ered doing to answer my ques­tions at last – my idly thought-up plan for a dar­ing raid on Jupiter Orbit. With hind­sight I’m not sure what it was that made me trust them so much, and as soon as I’d admit­ted it to them I regret­ted doing so. They asked if we could con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion in the kitchen. I was vis­i­bly shak­ing as I led them through the par­ti­tion, and I refused to look them in the eyes.

“I sup­pose you’re won­der­ing why we brought you in here,” Junko observed.

I remained silent.

“No cam­eras!” José said, and grinned.

I attempted a smile, but it couldn’t have come across as being genuine.

“Sheesh, chill it, will you? Jenny, we’re not corp-goons,” said José.

“Corp… goons?” It wasn’t an expres­sion I’d heard before.

“He means we don’t work for the Explorer Fed­er­a­tion,” explained Junko.

“Then…”

“José is a ‘cab­bie’. A free­lance pilot. I’m a secu­rity expert, who went under­ground after one of the corps tried to sue me for a job they paid me to do. The names on our passes are fake, although we’d appre­ci­ate it if you’d keep using them.”

I relaxed, sink­ing to the floor against one of the waveheaters.

“So what have I got to do with this? You wouldn’t be com­ing out here to talk if all you wanted me for was to use my café.”

“Junko and me, we’re a team,” said José. “What­ever the goods, who­ever you are, we’ll take them or you any­where you want to go. And I mean any­where. And off the record. Now our cus­tomers – all sorts. Crim­i­nals, obvi­ously, polit­i­cal dis­si­dents, rich orphans, para­noid old geezers. But our biggest cus­tomers of all, they’re the corps. It fig­ures, even the peo­ple in charge have things to do that they don’t want oth­ers find­ing out about. We keep quiet, and they pay us well. They don’t even mind Junko fuckin’ with their com­put­ers to keep us hidden.”

Junko con­tin­ued where he left off. “Charm­ing. What my friend seems to be try­ing hard not to say is that we do work for the Explorer Fed­er­a­tion occa­sion­ally. Mostly we’re paid not to ask about what we’re car­ry­ing, but the cargo that I think will inter­est you was clearly marked. Com­puter cores; some kind of new tech­nol­ogy. They came in smooth black boxes, maybe six feet long by two feet wide and deep. We’ve fer­ried three or four in our time, but from what we’ve heard from oth­ers in the busi­ness these new com­puter cores have been in pro­duc­tion for about thirty years. And yet only one or two a year get sent, always from a small lab on Cal­listo, always to EF Jupiter Orbit Dock, and they’re always shipped by rogue traders such as ourselves.”

“Now why might they want to do that?” José said.

Junko gave him a with­er­ing look, but he just grinned at her and car­ried on.

“Seems to me these com­put­ers ain’t quite what they’re pre­tend­ing they are. An’ I think you feel the same way.”

“These are the same com­puter cores that we installed on the Celes­tial Fleet?” I asked.

“You bet. Any old-time cab­bies I talked to have all said the same – the busiest time for run­ning these things was the time they were build­ing those ships.”

I swal­lowed, the sound unnerv­ingly loud inside my head. “What’s really going on here?” I asked. “You two run all sorts of con­tra­band around the solar sys­tem for any­one with enough money. Why are you so inter­ested in com­put­ers that are prob­a­bly less sus­pect than most of the other stuff you run, and why you inter­ested in a cook who couldn’t afford to buy even a minute of your time?”

“Well,” Junko replied, “it started with the lit­tle inves­ti­ga­tion we did. In our trade you can’t afford to trust any­one, so when we first heard your story we were sus­pi­cious. After all, you could be any­one. We did a lit­tle research into your past. And, as I’m sure you’re more than aware, you were telling the truth.

“Now, we did all this from a secure ter­mi­nal, plenty of cross-net prox­ies, avoid­ing Angel nodes, all my usual secu­rity mea­sures. We thought our con­nec­tion was absolutely water-tight.”

“Turns out,” José chimed in, “that it wasn’t. Go fig­ure. A few days later, we got word that some­one was after us. Someone’d been keep­ing an eye out for any­one inves­ti­gat­ing you, and it was some­one with much bet­ter gear than our junk.”

“Just because you don’t under­stand it, José, doesn’t make it junk. Besides, com­pared to the ship it’s on…”

“Maria is not–” José started, but quickly saw the look on Junko’s face. “Not the topic of con­ver­sa­tion. Right.”

“Any­way,” José con­tin­ued with a sigh, “A con­tact of ours had an idea who it might be – and guess what, it’s a name we saw in your back­ground. I’m sure you remem­ber the name well, in fact.

“Lance Peter­son.”

Lance. That was a name I thought – and hoped – I’d never hear again. Twenty years had been a long time. Plenty long enough to for­get what fond­ness I once felt for the man, and to start blam­ing his ‘car­ing’ idiocy for my predicament.

I hadn’t seen the man since the day he escorted me to hos­pi­tal. With my sup­posed ill­ness I was never allowed to return to the sta­tion, so we mailed back and forth for a while. Almost a year it would have been, before he sud­denly announced that he was going with the fleet. Two hours before depar­ture, he chose to tell me that. I sup­pose he thought that leav­ing it so late would soften the blow, but of course it didn’t. It just reminded me of how much of a cow­ard he was. And that was my last mem­ory of him before he left our solar sys­tem, never to return. Or so I thought.

“But, Lance…” I said. “Lance left on the Moon Ser­aph, didn’t he?”

“So his records say,” Junko replied. “But if it really is him after us, it cer­tainly doesn’t look like that’s the case.”

That lying bas­tard. Twenty long years, with­out even both­er­ing to men­tion to me that he’d stayed behind!

“Any­way, Jenny,” José said, inter­rupt­ing the flow of my anger. “It rather looks like we’ve gotta’ get that guy off our backs. I’m sure he was a real sweet lad and all, but we ain’t keen to find out what he’s like now.

Seems to me you’ve got your­self a choice. You can either stay here cook­ing up grub for corp-goons, and have a lovely chat with Lance once he realises you’re an easy way for him to get at us, or you can come with us.”

“Come with you? Where are you going to take me?”

“That’s another choice for you! We can either drop ya’ off on some back­wa­ter some­where and keep on runnin’.

Or since we’ll be up in the sky any­way, we could all pay a visit to Jupiter Orbit.” José winked.

“Jupiter Orbit?”

“Sure, why not?”

“It’s only me that wants to find out about those com­put­ers, isn’t it? You two are just on the run from Lance. If it is Lance.”

“Aww, c’mon Jenny! Don’t deprive us of a lit­tle excitement!”

“Besides,” Junko said, “Isn’t it us that just put you in this sit­u­a­tion? We must owe you a favour.”

“A favour? But you’d be risk­ing your lives for me!”

“That’s what favours are for,” said José. “Wel­come to free­dom, Jenny. Creds are for the corps, favours are the real cur­rency out­side of Corp ‘utopia’.”

For the first time in the whole con­ver­sa­tion, I smiled honestly.

“The choice is yours,” José said.

Junko handed me a scrap of paper – real paper rather than a stand­alone vid­screen – and the two of them left the kitchen.

On their way out, José’s grin­ning face appeared briefly in the serv­ing hatch.

“See you later,” he said, as if the choice was not mine at all.

I sat in silence for a while, the shock of the exchange hav­ing caught up with me.

Even­tu­ally, the dull pain in my back from the wave­heater reg­is­tered in my train of thought. I stood up sud­denly, over­es­ti­mat­ing the risk of being burned by the thing.

How long had that exchange taken? Five, ten min­utes at most. And yet it had held far more sto­ryscreen drama than my pre­vi­ous twenty years put together.

Ear­lier that day I’d been dis­miss­ing my half-formed plan as a mean­ing­less day­dream, and now I had fallen in with wanted contraband-runners who wanted to try my plan any­way. And, all the while, we were on the run from Lance of all peo­ple, who it turned out had not run away twenty years ago but had stayed in the solar sys­tem and still had some kind of inter­est in me.

That thought weighed heav­ily on my mind. What kind of ‘inter­est’ led to hunt­ing down peo­ple who looked up her pro­file? But then, I reminded myself, this was Lance. Always doing the right thing, always doing it in com­pletely the wrong way.

I took a long, deep breath, and looked at the piece of paper.

‘Sec­tion D, level 12, bay P16.’

Must be where their ship was docked.

José had been right with that flip­pant com­ment of his. Much as I thought I was fond of mak­ing my own deci­sions in life, the choice really wasn’t mine – and the odd thing was, I didn’t feel so bad about it. Just in the imme­di­ate sense, my future sud­denly looked very sim­ple. There was just one thing I needed to do, I just had to get to that ship. And despite all the para­noia that each of us had built up since child­hood – the ever-vigilant Ether net­work, the all-seeing Angels, the atten­tive Free City Secu­rity – it was easy.

I walked to my room, col­lected a few things, and turned off my Angel. I had made a habit of turn­ing the thing off every now and again, ever since the inci­dent, so its deac­ti­va­tion prob­a­bly wouldn’t flag up as suspicious.

Ah, how much I owed to those human rights lawyers who orig­i­nally cam­paigned for the abil­ity to turn the Angels off.

With a bag slung over my back I headed out, through the labyrinthine cor­ri­dors and out into the main plaza, down to level 12, found the right dock­ing bay, walked down the ramp and into the ship. Nowhere did a door deny me access, no secu­rity guards inter­rupted my progress, no-one ques­tioned that my Angel was offline.

Easy.

It was only as the doors of the tiny ship closed behind me, cut­ting me off from Free City per­haps for­ever, that the first con­sid­er­a­tion of real, tan­gi­ble dan­ger first stirred in my head; the first time the real­i­sa­tion hit that this was as far from a sto­ryscreen adven­ture as I could get.

It was too easy.

And if there was one thing that real life was not, it was easy.

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