Fairweather Read online

  FAIRWEATHER

  RAYA JONES

  © Raya Jones 2017

  Raya Jones has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2017 by Venture Press Ltd., an imprint of Endeavour Press

  Table of Contents

  Part 1 - Harvey

  Part 2 - Mandy

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  Part 1 - Harvey

  You need to know three things about me. The first thing is that when I start a search, I don’t let go. I have no master and no name. Some call me the Tracker. Some call me the Retriever. There are other names. Most people don’t know I exist, and others don’t believe it. I live to find things that are difficult to find, and make my living by finding things that people don’t want found. I rummage in the wastelands of corrupted codes, retrieving data that don’t concern me for clients I don’t meet.

  Sometimes I do it because I can. When I was older than seven and not yet eleven, I’ve heard about someone whose friend of a friend knew someone who had died whilst being logged into a game and went on living in a digital form forever. People dismiss such stories as cyber myths. But I started a search, didn’t let go, and eventually pinned it down. The ghost was a chimera of corrupted codes, and wasn’t sure anymore whether it used to be male or female, but it knew that the human being it once was had died in an explosion on a mining rig off Titan.

  Digital memories of lives swirl in eddies where human sorrows and hopes are replaced with chunks of codes and binary bits. When not in school, I used to roam cyberspace wastelands where only loose youth loiter and lost souls linger. Or so I thought. Someone was already watching me.

  My favourite avatar at the time was a six-foot tall fluffy pink rabbit with glittery diamond eyes. Its physical likeness—a small stuffed toy—lay faded and dusty on a pile of junk. We lived in an abandoned factory and kept everything in case it could be traded. Only useless things stayed on that pile for years. ‘Useless thing,’ my mother said in our language, Japanese, when she brought the toy home and flung it there. She was too tired and sad to be angry. ‘A piece of retro junk for tourists, not even a chip in it. Who gives such a thing to a woman? They won’t give it to an android whore by way of payment. Are you in school?’ She always checked. She had me illegally hooked to Cy-High, the best of school networks, and taught me how to shadow students without being caught. ‘Study hard to get citizenship so you won’t end up like me,’ she told me relentlessly, and never told the same story twice when I asked why she’d ended up like that. Usually she was paid in black-market goods, sometimes in food, and bartered for everything else except for electricity, which we stole for free. She got me state-of-the-art hardware and the best software. I was short for nothing even if we had to go hungry.

  Two SocServ officers, who came one day when my mother was away and described themselves as social workers, knew the name I used when roaming cyberspace as that rabbit. ‘Harvey. We know it’s you. We’ve been tracking your signal for months. How old are you, twelve, thirteen already?’

  I stood silent in the dim hall, dwarfed by corroded skeletons of defunct machinery. Dust swirled in slanted rays of daylight shining through cracks in the boarded-up windows.

  Their eyes darted everywhere. Their approach to the derelict factory had triggered the alarm in plenty of time for me to hide the hardware. But unlike robbers who sometime came this far, the social workers were not fooled by the old desktop deck we kept active for appearances’ sake. They had seen me dance in cyberspace and suspected that the mattress on the floor hid the portable portal I needed for those manoeuvres.

  When they spotted the pink rabbit on the junk pile, they instantly knew the kind of scanner I had. ‘Are you recording this?’ one of them asked, picking up electronic activity on his handheld gadget.

  I said, ‘It’s a gun fixed on you. If you move one more step, I’ll shoot. I’ve killed before.’

  ‘Yes, we saw you kill in cyberspace,’ the woman said. ‘The way you dismantle codes is amazing. That’s why we’re here, Harvey. Do you have a real name? Aren’t you supposed to be a girl?’

  I said nothing.

  The man said, ‘Look, kid, Harvey, someone is very impressed with what you can do and wants to sponsor you. We are making you an offer. This is your chance to become a proper person.’

  All the while I was listening for my mother returning, as if she’d make a sound sneaking in. From outdoors came only the usual noise: the drone of power generators, aircraft rumble and sonic booms, shrieks of gulls circling refuse tips and dogs barking, distant music, and human voices from the yard several stories below.

  The social workers spoke as if without breaking the silence indoors:

  ‘You don’t have to live like this anymore.’ ‘You’ll live in pristine society in a room with portals on every wall.’ ‘Never be cold or hungry again.’ ‘Or too hot, it gets awfully humid out here. And the mosquitoes…’ ‘You won’t get raped and killed by gangsters.’ They went on listing bad things about living in the slums and good things about pristine society. ‘Androids deliver pizzas to your doorstep, imagine that!’

  I kept silent.

  The second thing you need to know about me is that I grew up in the Edges of Ground Zero. In Ground Zero, where the Apocalypse Asteroid hit Earth, there’s a sense of fate and freedom like nowhere else. Within a few decades afterwards, humanity filled the crater around the shallow sea that had formed there. The sea vanished into sewers and pipes beneath the biodomes of the Phoenix towns long before I was born. The crater became crammed full with decaying buildings and layers upon layers of ramshackle dwellings and dilapidated constructions, with power stations, traffic towers, and communication masts jutting through a sprawl of slums, locally called the Edges. At the western rim, gigantic cliffs rise to immense heights. Soaring above the industry and grime, the cliffs are laced with labyrinthine trails and girdled with sightseeing platforms. Pilgrims come.

  The cliffs loomed over everything in my childhood. Their impassable slopes appeared and disappeared in acrid smog and dust that got indoors through cracks. Their presence was felt even with the windows boarded up. Their shadow brought darkness indoors. The only room lighting was the rainbow glow of adverts and logos playing on the old desktop deck. To the social workers I appeared like a thin silhouette against the backdrop of shadows. I stayed silent and motionless. They coaxed, ‘You’ll get trained properly, go to school. Won’t you like that? Your mother will never get citizenship again. Nobody will take her after what she did. But your slate is clean. You can have your pick of the big corporations. Don’t you want to know the truth about your birth?’

  I didn’t think there was any mystery about my birth. I knew biology. I said nothing.

  Eventually they gave up and left, leaving behind a plastic card for when I change my mind.

  Soon my mother was dead and there was nowhere else I could go. When I swiped the pass in a public portal, I was teleported away instantly. They had a fix on me all along.

  The third thing you need to know is what I’ll tell you next: how and why I came back to Earth.

  People tell myths even when the facts are known. It’s well known that life on Earth became harsh, and humanity started to colonise even harsher environments in the solar system long before the Apocalypse Event. There were bloody conflicts among the affluent interplanetary corporations and the poverty-stricken kingdoms of Earth. Corruption was rife. Complacency was commonplace. Those facts made
it possible for a large rock to hurtle unhindered towards Earth and past the planet’s decaying defences. The total disintegration of the terrestrial kingdoms has suited the corporations very well indeed. In no time at all afterwards—some say, even before the Apocalypse—they divided the devastated Earth between them. The stage was set for the biggest conspiracy theory of all time: a secret committee of executives, a Council of Nine, who collaborated to let the asteroid’s strike happen.

  Finding evidence for the Apocalypse Conspiracy became the Holy Grail of amateur cyber archaeologists. Every now and then someone plucks half-a-string of data from ancient echoes and reconstructs a suspicious exchange in some obsolete computer language. Freedom Cordova, a middle-aged professor in a marginal college in the Ronda star system, didn’t think much of a finding that one of his students posted on the class bulletin. He used her finding to demonstrate to students how to deconstruct false leads. But a few years later, the CSG suddenly commissioned him to investigate it further.

  If the professor wondered why the CSG chose him—a mediocre historian who didn’t even specialise in Apocalypse studies—he didn’t ask. He was going to get access to locked sites and highly classified information. He might get lucky and find something after all. They insisted on keeping it top secret, arranged for him to relocate to a secure research facility, and for a special agent to replace him without anyone being notified of his unofficial study leave.

  He wasn’t meant to know that it was a ploy to let the CSG, the watchdog of the corporate nations, gain undercover access to OK, the corporation funding his college, though he could suspect it. There were rumours of corruption in OK. He couldn’t possibly suspect that I wasn’t a CSG agent. They hired me as a freelance investigator because someone suspected corruption within the CSG.

  As soon as Freedom Cordova saw me stepping out of a vehicle docking in his home bay, he gasped in disbelief. ‘You’re not the milkman!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It’s a joke. I know who you are. What are you, Japanese? Couldn’t they find someone who looks a little bit like me?’ He was Caucasian with naturally dark complexion that he further darkened with artificial tan, and a mane of bleached white hair styled like a corona around his head. He laughed heartily and often. He met me dressed in a plain blue biosuit for his journey, but he usually wore colourful caftans, sarongs, or yukatas around the house. ‘Come in come in, whatever your name is.’ He led me down a metal corridor.

  ‘Special Agent Dee Valiant,’ I informed. The real Dee Valiant was somewhere remote at the time. ‘I’ve blocked my badge from transmitting my ID. There mustn’t be any record of my arrival.’

  ‘Of course, of course not. That’s why you come under the pretext of groceries delivery. Where’s your luggage?’

  Everything I owned was in a small rucksack on my back.

  He asked whether I was going to stay in uniform the whole time.

  ‘I’m not in uniform.’

  ‘This black biosuit looks like a uniform,’ he merrily contended. ‘You don’t need to wear it here. The life support almost never malfunctions. The gravity thingamabob can be temperamental, though. You’re welcome to use my wardrobe—the few things I’m leaving behind, ha-ha!’ A domestic robot carted an enormous chest to the vehicle.

  I advised him to keep his biosuit on in the research facility, RK-17. He glanced at me concerned, ‘Isn’t it safe there?’

  ‘Safer than here.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that! Lord knows we pay enough taxes to your agency.’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Lord knows is a figure of speech, young man. They should have made you study my idioms if you’re going to pass as me.’ His digital image will intercept any communications I’ll make on his behalf, and my voice will be disguised to sound like his, but nothing could replace his mannerism. ‘Spend a few days studying my funny little ways. You can check out archives of my lessons before the semester starts.’

  ‘I intend to rerun your archived lectures.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’ve been doing for years,’ he laughed. ‘You’ll have a holiday working here. These are my living quarters,’ he explained needlessly, entering a cluttered open-plan apartment. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve switched off all the cameras,’ he reassured. He lived alone on an asteroid and liked to keep in touch with friends by means of live videos. I scanned for covert surveillance just the same. There was none except for the devices planted by the CSG, which he wasn’t supposed to know about.

  He prattled on, ‘Treat everything here like yours, Dee Valiant. Except for the wine, that’s the only irreplaceable thing here. Help yourself to one bottle. Please consider it a gift from me. This is exciting, isn’t it? Such an adventure! But I guess it’s just routine for you. Me, I can’t imagine giving up your private life for, what, could be years.’

  ‘Six months and three weeks.’

  ‘Right. Well, make yourself at home. You are under orders to do that, ha-ha!’

  His home was crammed full with furniture and every surface was laden with ornamental knickknacks. In time I got used to it. But I based myself in a separate room that he kept for guests who didn’t want to sleep with him. I moved all the furniture and ornaments out of that room, leaving only a mattress on the floor.

  Before he left he inquired whether I’d been briefed about his assignment. When I nodded, he said, ‘So you know that this is very exciting for me. If it pans out, I’ll… Did they tell you what it’s about?’ he checked, anxious not to breach the secrecy clause in his contract.

  When I scrutinised that conversation a year later, I couldn’t find anything in his demeanour to suggest that he wasn’t genuinely keen to do that research.

  At the time, I told him that I knew what it was about, adding, ‘Surely you don’t believe it. You’ve been deconstructing your student’s finding for the past seven semesters. I’ve checked it myself. There’s nothing in it.’

  ‘Leave archaeology to the experts, Dee Valiant. There’s a lot I need to brief you about before I leave, but would you like some refreshments first? Do you like tea? How about chamomile?’

  ‘Tea will be fine.’ I didn’t know what chamomile was.

  We sat in an alcove with a wall-sized window and sofas positioned for viewing the panorama of stars. He placed the tea tray on a low table, pushing aside an assortment of little figurines to make room. ‘My antiques,’ he said fondly. ‘And your Achilles heel.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your vulnerable point. Do you know anything about the antique trade?’

  I investigated OldEwoldE a few years earlier, I told him, and he laughed, ‘So you know everything about antiques and nothing at all about the people who buy them. We have our own lingo, in-jokes and legends. My dealer will know you’re not me the moment you open your mouth. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together. If I avoid contact she’ll get suspicious. And sometimes she calls unexpectedly if she spots something that might interest me.’

  ‘We’ve taken it into account.’ Personal calls will be diverted to him. He didn’t have to be cut off from his social network, only to avoid telling them where he really was.

  ‘Quite so, I guess you people think of everything.’

  ‘Not what to do if your dealer decides to renew your romantic relationship and comes here in person.’

  ‘You know about that too? Well, I guess you would. But our fling is well and truly over.’

  ‘We’ve taken it into account.’

  At last he left.

  Three months later the first semester was over. A distant nebula came into view. Freedom usually had guests come to enjoy it, but this year he made excuses why none were invited. Only unmanned trade deliveries came and went. Then unexpectedly a private craft requested permission to dock. ‘You know me, Professor. I’m your student. I need to see you.’ The face of a square-jawed young woman flickered into the domestic communication screen.

  ‘There’s no Haüyne on my class list,’ I told her. />
  ‘It’s pronounced ha-win,’ she corrected, ‘I’m an ex-student.’

  ‘I’ve had hundreds.’

  ‘Don’t play games with me! You’ve been deconstructing my discovery for years. Let me dock right now or I’ll blow this asteroid of yours to smithereens.’ She exaggerated, but her craft did have weapons that could damage the life support.

  ‘How does an ex-student of mine get hold of such weapons?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m space patrol with Securos. Let me land now.’

  ‘It’s a private craft.’ I stalled, retrieving information about her.

  ‘It’s an unmarked vehicle. Let me in right now.’

  ‘We can speak on this channel.’

  ‘Can’t you see my weapons charging? Open up or I’ll… Wise move!’

  I didn’t go to meet her. When she arrived at the apartment she found me sitting on a sofa facing the stars. I wore my biosuit as always, and didn’t look more at home than the day I arrived. She was in patrol uniform, a black biosuit similar to mine, with a gun on her belt. ‘Where’s the professor?’

  ‘I’m the professor. Come and sit down, Haüyne. Don’t be afraid. You know I don’t have any weapons. Do you have time for refreshments? So you’re a security guard now, good for you. How about chamomile?’

  ‘Don’t patronise me. You can’t be Freedom Cordova.’

  ‘You think I’m too young to be a professor. Lord knows I get this reaction all the time. That’s why I’ve created the image of the old guy with the funny hairdo.’

  ‘You’re not much older than I am and Freedom Cordova was teaching since I don’t know when!’

  ‘The name belongs to the college,’ I retorted. ‘We professors come and go, but “Freedom Cordova” stays faculty. What do you want to tell me face to face?’

  She came nearer but stayed standing. ‘My discovery you’re working on, I want in. It’s my lead. It’s genuine. I know it is.’