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“What happened wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know he was doing an onan, or that he was o-looping. But, damn it, be suspicious! If they’re showing fuzzy symptoms, or symptoms that don’t really make sense, do a scan and check for resident nano! If Howell had access to the stuff, it’s a sure bet that a dozen others on the Clymer are using, too. I’m going to need to take this to the skipper.”
“Yes, sir. Uh …”
“What?”
“What about me, sir? Am I on report?”
“Why would you be on report?”
“I screwed up. I missed the nano, I didn’t think of addiction when I saw him at sick call this morning, and I gave him enough aspirin to trigger those convulsions.”
Francis sighed. He raised his hand and began ticking points off on his fingers. “One, you didn’t ‘screw up.’ You could have been a little more persistent, a little more observant. But his symptoms looked like a clear call. The flu.
“Two. You’re not a doctor, nor do you have training in neurophysiology. At sick call, you screen the patients so that I don’t have to see all of them, and sort out the malingerers from the ones who are really sick. You’re trained to handle routine stuff. Colds and STDs and stubbed toes. Nanogenic dopamine addictive response is not routine.
“Three. One of the most complicated and difficult aspects of medicine is understanding how drugs or nano programs can interact or interfere with one another. It’s amazing how complicated things can get, with different drugs either reinforcing one another, or cancelling each other out—and with illegal nano, all bets are off!
“Four. Aspirin has been around since the late nineteenth century, unless you count shamans prescribing willow bark for pain, which is where the stuff came from. We’ve understood in general how it works since the late twentieth. But, believe me, even something that’s been around as long as aspirin can still surprise you. People have unusual sensitivities, or allergies, or they’re on drugs or nano treatments, or they’re shooting themselves full of crap that could kill them.
“And no one can keep up with all of the possibilities. That’s why we have expert systems, AIs with medical databases that let them guide us through the jungle of drug interactions. When in doubt, use them.”
I sagged a bit inside. “I do, when there’s a question,” I said. “But I didn’t have a question this time. I really thought Howell had a cold.”
“It happens to all of us, Carlyle. We make mistakes, we’re not perfect. Things could have turned out a lot worse for Private Howell, believe me. They didn’t. So … you made a mistake. Learn from it. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Questions?”
“Just … is this going to affect my FMF training?”
“Hell, no. You’re a good Corpsman, and I want you on my team. So as far as I’m concerned, you’re in.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You want liberty tonight?”
I thought about it. Right then, I really wanted to get off the ship. There was this bar in Supra-Cayambe I really liked: the Earthview.
“Yes, sir. If that’s okay …”
“Absolutely. Give me your hand.”
I extended my left hand, and he passed a wand over it. All military personnel have a programmable chip implanted in their left wrist and another in the back of their head. They serve as ID—what the military used to call dog tags—and can also carry orders and authorizations. My CDF in-head hardware—my Cerebral Data Feed implants—could also carry orders, of course, but the Navy takes a dim view of enlisted personnel writing or rewriting their own.
What Dr. Francis had just done was give me an authorization, signed by him, my department head, to leave the ship for twelve hours, what both the Navy and the Marine Corps refer to as liberty.
I was free for the evening, unless, of course, we had an emergency recall.
“Have you heard anything about when we’re shipping out again, sir?” I asked.
“Not a word. I wouldn’t worry about it. If they’re putting together an out-system expeditionary force, it’s going to take them a while to assemble all the ships. So enjoy your time ashore.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
As an ass-chewing, Dr. Francis’s lecture wasn’t bad at all. In fact, I think he was trying to encourage me. But the talk hadn’t made me feel better. If anything, I felt worse.
“Hey, e-Car! You going ashore?”
It was Dubois. I’d just walked into the squad bay, on my way to my compartment to change into civvies.
“I guess so,” I told him. “I need a drink, or ten.”
“Yeah. Francis chewed you a new one, huh?”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“It’s all over the ship, you know, that he had you on the carpet for dropping the ball with Howell.”
“Great,” I told him. “Exactly what I needed to hear.”
I was really looking forward to that drink.
Chapter Four
THE EARTHVIEW LOUNGE IS LOCATED AT THE TOP OF THE CAYAMBE Space Elevator, and the place is well named. The view from up there is spectacular.
The Space Elevator went into operation in 2095, a 71,000-kilometer-high woven buckycarb tether stretching from Earthport, atop the third-highest mountain in Ecuador, all the way up to Starport. The other two elevators, at Mount Kenya and Pulau Lingga/Singapore, came on-line later, but Cayambe was the first. A cartel of banking and space-industry businesses built the elevator, and it was run as an international megacorporation until the Commonwealth officially took it over in 2115.
Halfway up, just below the 36,000-kilometer level, is the Geosynch Center, which is a major node of communications and industrial facilities clustered around the elevator, both in free orbit and attached to the cable. It’s also the location of the big solar reflector arrays. Starport, however, is all the way up at the top, built into and around the surface of the five-kilometer asteroid used to anchor the elevator and keep it stretched out taut—a stone tied to the end of a whirling string. Ships launching from Starport picked up a small but free boost from the centrifugal force of the elevator’s once-per-day rotation.
I went ashore with Doob and HM3 Charlie “Machine” McKean, flashing our electronic passes at the AI of the watch and riding the transparent docking tube from Clymer’s quarterdeck up to the planetoid in a transport capsule.
It was quite a view. The George Clymer was nestled into the space dock facility on the planetoid’s far side, the location of Starport’s Commonwealth naval base. A dozen other ships were there as well, including the assault carrier Lewis B. Puller, three times the Clymer’s length, ten times her mass, and carrying four squadrons of A/S-60 and A/S-104 Marine planetary assault fighters, plus numerous reconnaissance and support spacecraft. There were civilian ships as well, including a couple of deep interstellar research vessels, the Stephen Hawking and the Edward Witten.
Most of the Starport planetoid is in microgravity. The rock itself doesn’t have enough mass for more than a whisper of gravity of its own, and this far out from Earth, the centrifugal force created by its rotation amounts to about 0.0017 of a G.
That means that if you drop a wineglass, after the first second it’s fallen one and a half centimeters—a smitch more than half an inch—and there’s plenty of time to catch it before it hits the deck.
But, of course, you don’t want to be drinking out of a wineglass in the first place. Things still have their normal mass in microgravity, if not their weight, and once the wine gets to swirling in the glass it will keep moving up and out and all over you and the deck in shimmying slow-motion spheres.
Which was why we were headed for the Starport Nearside Complex, the small space city constructed on the Earth-facing side of the planetoid, better known as the Wheel. It’s a kilometer-wide wheel encircling the up-tether from Earth, and rotating once a minute to create an out-is-down spin gravity of about half a G.
We caught the thru-tube that whisked us from the Starport Terminal through the core of the planetoid and deposited us at the hub of Wheel City. From there, we floated our way into the rotating entryway and rose through one of the spokes, the sensation of gravity steadily increasing as we rose farther out from the hub.
The Wheel holds the heart of the Commonwealth Starport Naval Base, including the headquarters and communications center, support facilities, and a Marine training module, but over half of the huge structure is civilian territory, a free port administered directly by the Commonwealth. The Earthview was a bar-restaurant combo located in one of the Wheel segments, and it came by its name honestly.
The entryway checked our passes as we walked in. One entire wall, from floor to ceiling, was a viewall looking down-tether at Earth.
The disk appeared about thirty times larger than a full moon from Earth, a dazzlingly brilliant swirl of azure seas and intensely white clouds and polar caps. The planet was in half-phase at the moment, with the sunset terminator passing through Ecuador and down the South American spine of the Andes Mountains. It was late summer in the northern hemisphere, so the terminator ran almost straight north up the Atlantic seaboard. South, the bulge of Brazil was picked out by the massed city lights of the megapolis stretching from Montevideo to Belém.
North, of course, the New Ice Age still held northern New England and much of Canada in a midwinter’s death’s grip, despite all the efforts of the mirror array at Geosynch. The Canadian ice sheets, especially, were blinding in the afternoon sunlight.
At the moment, the viewall image was coming through an external camera somewhere on the planetoid; the Earth and the starfield behind it weren’t rotating with the Wheel’s stately spin. I could see one of the elevator capsules on its way up-tether, gleaming bright silver in the sunlight.
“You been here before, e-Car?” Machine asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I admitted. “I like the view.”
Doob cackled a nasty laugh. “View is right! The girls here are spectacular!”
Which wasn’t what I meant, of course, but, hey, when the man’s right, he’s right. The Earthview was actually divided into halves, separated by a soundproof bulkhead. The side reserved for civilians was rather genteel, I’d heard—fine dining at exorbitant prices, the food delivered by robotic waitstaff indistinguishable from FAB (flesh and blood). They even served real beef there, shipped up-tether for the financial equivalent of two arms, a leg, and the promised delivery of your firstborn.
The Earthview Lounge next door, however, was a bit … livelier. Naked FAB waitresses, live sex shows on the black, fur-padded central stage, and throbbing, full-sensory music fed directly through the patrons’ implants and going straight to those parts of the brain responsible for hearing and feeling. And the girls were gorgeous, ranging from exotic genies to BTL sexbots to winsome girl-next-door types. The joint wasn’t reserved for the military, not officially, anyway, but I doubt that most civilians were all that comfortable there. The fleet was in, and enlisted personnel tended to get a bit territorial with their liberty hot spots.
Doob and Machine and I let the door deduct the cover charge from our eccounts and we wandered in, looking for good seats. An enthusiastic ménage-à-quatre was writhing away on the stage, backlit by the half-full Earth, and the place was flooded with blue-silver earthlight. A hostess wearing a plastic smile and some luminous animated tattoos showed us to a table close to the entertainment and took our drink orders. The mood music, a piece I half recognized by Apokyleptos, literally felt like hands running over my body; the audible part was too damned loud, but I dialed my reception down a bit and it was okay after that.
A waitress brought us our drinks and one of those smiles, and we leaned back in the chairs to enjoy the show. I’d ordered a hyperbolic trajectory—vodka, white rum, metafuel, and blue incandescence. I tossed it back, shuddered through the burn, and after that I didn’t care quite so much about screwing up with Howell. After my second glass, I didn’t care at all about Howell, and after the third I didn’t care much about anything.
“So I hear you didn’t get booted from the program,” Machine said. “Lucky.”
“I guess,” I said, but without much enthusiasm. “I’ve been having second thoughts, y’know?”
“What, about going FMF?” Doob asked. “Shit, every Corpsman wants to go FMF! Best of the best, right?”
“S’okay,” I said, shrugging, “if you like jarheads.” My lips felt numb and I was having some trouble shaping the words.
“Don’t you?” McKean asked.
“Sure, when the bastards aren’t trying to put something over on you.” I was still feeling burned by Howell’s attempt to get another shot of nano.
“So why did you volunteer for FMF in the first place?” Dubois asked. “You coulda put in your four and gotten out.”
Four years was the minimum enlistment period for the Navy. To get FMF, I’d had to “ship for six,” as we say, extending my enlistment to ten years, total.
I shrugged. “I wanted to get rich, of course.”
NO ONE JOINS THE NAVY TO GET RICH, OF COURSE. YOU GET ROOM and board and some great opportunities to travel, sure, but base pay is about a twelfth what a good systems programmer gets on the outside, and maybe a quarter of the take-home pay of a ’bot director at an e-car manufactory. No one, unless you take the long view, and have a father who’s senior vice president of research and development for General Nanodynamics.
Lots of medical doctors get their start in the Hospital Corps. It offers a good, basic education in general medicine and applied nano, and universities with medical programs smile on ex-corpsmen looking for grants or scholarships. But the economic rewards can be even bigger when what you bring home is a cool and useful bit of xenotech.
That’s because, anymore, Navy Corpsmen aren’t just the enlisted medics for the Marines and Navy. Because of their technical training, and the fact that in the field and they’re already lugging around a fair amount of specialized gear, they’re also the science technicians for any military field op. Sampling the local atmosphere, studying the biosphere and reporting on what might bite, and even establishing first contact with the locals all fall into a Corpsman’s MOS, his military occupational specialty—his job description, if you like.
And that means that Corpsmen are perfectly placed to pick up alien technologies when they make first contact, or to bring home innovative ways of utilizing human nanotech. They even get to keep the military-issued CDF hardware that allows in-head linking, and that can provide a hell of a competitive advantage in the civilian world.
So when I finished the series on my basic education downloads, my father, Spencer Carlyle, suggested that I might want to join the Navy—specifically the Hospital Corps—in order to learn skills that would benefit both me and the family.
My grandfather went to work for General Nanodynamics sixty-three years ago when it was a data-mining start-up, wading through the Encyclopedia Galactica’s hundreds of millions of hours of data, finding the codes that would unlock its secrets and release untold alien secrets of science, technology, and art that we could apply here on Earth. Better, though, is to go straight to the source, to actually learn new methods of materials manufacturing or chemistry or medicine directly from a living xenoculture. It’s one thing to pull off the EG’s stats on the X’ghr and learn that they’re very good at biochemistry. It’s something quite else to visit the aliens in person and pick their brains.
In 2212, my father led the General Nanodynamics team that developed cybertelomeric engineering from the data brought back from direct contact with the X’ghr eight years earlier.
Telomeres are the end-caps that keep chromosomes from unraveling, but they grow shorter with each division of the cell. When the telomeres wear away after forty or fifty divisions, the cell dies and aging sets in. Cybertelomerics refers to various means of controlling or guiding telomere replication inside cells without generating the out-of-control cell growth and immortality known as a cancer. As a result, humans alive today can expect to live two or three hundred years or more, rejuve treatments can have an eighty-year-old looking like forty, and clinical immortality might be just around the corner. Whether or not human immortality is a good thing is beside the point; the biochemical data brought back from the X’ghr homeworld by the crew of the Hippocrates promises to utterly transform what it means to be human.
That one bit of xenotech should have made my family quite wealthy.
It didn’t. That was because the government stepped in and declared telomere therapy a national asset, with patents owned and controlled by the Commonwealth Institute of Health. Dad got a pat on the back and a nice bonus, but do you have any idea how much rich old people would pay for treatments that would keep them going for another couple of centuries? Or keep them looking and performing like VR sex stars?
But the government wants to maintain control of who gets rejuve treatments, at least for now. They say it’s to prevent runaway overpopulation; Dad was convinced that we’re going to have a lot of very young-looking senators, presidents, and wealthy campaign contributors over the next few centuries.
Cynical? Sure. And he managed to infect me with his bitterness as well. Government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich: it’s a system that’s been around for an obscenely long time, and one that’s very hard to fight. So Dad set out not to fight the system so much as to work with it. If we could nail down another big advance in medicine, materials processing, or chemistry from an untapped xenotech source, we might be able to exploit it off-world—at one of the free-market colonies, maybe—and do it in such a way that the Commonwealth couldn’t touch it.
That was the plan, at any rate. Nanotechnics is highly competitive, and new developments and techniques are coming along every day. The field is dominated by three or four big megacorporations and a dozen smaller ones, and the company that doesn’t keep up is going to find itself sidelined and forgotten in very short order. General Nanodynamics is about nine or ten in the hierarchy, but it’s well-placed to go multi-world and even give IBN and Raytheon-Mitsubishi a run for their e-creds.
My dad got into the field the old-fashioned way, going the route of AI development, but he thought having a Corpsman in the family might increase the chances of landing something big … a new technology, a new means of controlling or programming nanobots, a new approach to an old problem, like what the X’ghr did for telomere research.
And I was pretty excited about the idea myself. It wasn’t like I was letting my Dad do my thinking for me. I’d wanted to join the Navy anyway, the Hospital Corps in particular, because I had my eye on going to a school like Johns Hopkins or Bethesda University, one with a good medical download program, with an eye to becoming a doctor. I’d never been much interested in following in my father’s footsteps … or the footsteps of my grandfather and great grandfather. A century of Carlyles in General Nanodynamics, I thought, was quite enough.
Besides, to make money, real money, we needed to break free of the pack. As an employee of General Nanodynamics, with all of his ideas becoming the intellectual property of the corporation, my dad could manage a living that was comfortable enough, sure, but there is well-off rich, and there is filthy rich with a private Earth-to-orbit shuttle, your own synchorbital private mansion, and maybe a shot at some telomeric genengineering.
If I found myself in a position to bring back some exploitable xenotech, something Dad and his contacts could turn into a few hundred billion creds and a high-living lifestyle … hey, why not? I was in.
But I needed to go Fleet Marine Force to make it Out There, to give myself even a chance of being on a first contact team or encountering a new technic species not described in the EG.
And after my encounter with Private Howell that morning, I thought that my chances of that were becoming somewhat bleak. If I got dropped from FMF, I was looking at six more years of routine duty—working on the wards of a naval hospital somewhere, or serving as staff at a research station in Outer God-knows-where.
I was wondering if I’d just managed to deep-six my entire future.
“YOU JOINED THE FUCKING NAVY TO GET RICH?” MACHINE SAID, laughing. “My God, man, what planet are you from?”
“My man,” Doob added, “we need to run an EG xenospecies profile on you, stat! Lessee … ‘e-Car: civilization type zero-point-zero-weird. Biological code: really weird.’?”
“Weird squared,” Machine suggested.
The plan to score on xenotech was something I never talked about with anyone, of course. I shrugged off the teasing. “Hey, I’m tracking to become a med doctor, okay? Doctors can bring in the creds same as nanoware specialists.”
“Sure, and they work their asses off getting there,” Doob said.
Machine tossed off the rest of his drink—something called a “weightless slam,” and nodded. “Shit, you know how much ghost-mass doctors carry with them all the time? Ghost in the machine, dude. Ghost in the machine.”
Most doctors are connected on a semi-permanent basis to expert AI systems running on the local Net, often with ten or twelve load-links going at a time. That’s because no one person can possibly keep all of the data necessary in his memory—even in their plug-in cerebral RAM—to maintain a smoothly working knowledge of the pharmacology, anatomy, pathology, biochemistry, nanotechnic programming, holistics, cybernetics, and psychology needed to treat patients, and that’s just to name just a few. Doctors aren’t necessarily running all of those channels all the time, but it is, I’d been told, like having ten other people with you all the time, whispering, guiding, making suggestions, kibitzing, whether you are performing surgery or simply sitting down to dinner.
Some, like Dr. Francis, seemed to handle it pretty well. Sometimes, he would get a faraway look in his eyes, like he was listening to someone else while he’s talking to you, but usually you knew it was him behind that fresh-out-of-med-school face. In some cases, though, it became a kind of high-tech multiple-personality syndrome, where your original self tended to fade into the background as one or another of your resident AIs took over for you. I was thinking of Dr. Burchalter, on board the Puller, who often didn’t seem to be there when you talked to him. You knew you were taking orders from an expert AI who was running the show.
Ghost in the machine indeed. The term was invented a few centuries ago by a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle to describe conceptual problems with Descarte’s ideas of mind as distinct from body. Later, it described the neuro-evolutionary idea that human brains are grown atop mammalian brains grown atop reptilian brains, and that destructive impulses like hate, anger, or fear arise from those deeper, more primitive systems we still carry with us.
