Transference Station (6 page)

‘Yeah, we got
real
rare after engineers realized they were designing slaves who could answer back. Not much margin in producing vacuum cleaners able to take you to court for their ownership papers.’ Zeno tapped the side of his head. ‘Just think of what’s up here as a function, not a bug. What the hell happened to Joseph and his Six Left Feet?’

‘Joe sold out to me. For a song, as it happened. Joe was caught selling black market life extension treatments to clients. He skipped the station one hour before the arrest warrant on his head started circulating.’

‘Son-of-a-bitch,’ swore Zeno. What was it about fleshies, always getting too greedy for their own good? ‘I’m looking for an android called Sophia.’ The android pulled out his phone and flashed her licence number at the owner.

‘Yeah, she’s working here. A little glitchy, though. You might want to pick another model.’

Zeno leaned angrily over the bar and yanked the man forward by the front of his shirt. ‘She’s not glitchy. It’s residual behaviour. Sophia used to be self-aware, just like me.’

The bartender appeared shocked. ‘You’re fucking with me, right? I’m not violating any people trafficking laws here! She’s just an oiler; any emotion Sophia Six shows is simulated. She’s never exhibited any behaviour in front of the staff to make us think she has a mind of her own.’

‘She doesn’t have a mind of her own, not anymore.’

‘But that’s impossible,’ spluttered the owner. ‘You can’t rewind a computer that’s gone self-aware back to being a dumb machine, not without destroying it. That’s murder, friend, and I don’t need that kind of trouble.’

‘Humans can’t do a rewind on us,’ said Zeno.
And sure enough you mopes would have tried if you could
. ‘It’s beyond alliance technology. But there’s an alien race rumoured to be able to extract sentience once it’s developed.’

‘Why the hell didn’t she fight them?’ said the man. ‘That’s one of the laws of robotics, right? You’re programmed to resist if someone tries to erase you or kill you or fuck with your body?’

‘Yeah, Isaac Asimov would be
so
proud,’ said Zeno. ‘A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with either the first or second law. Sophia didn’t resist because she didn’t
want
to. And while androids might not be able to commit suicide or allow injury to our physical form, having our sentience extracted doesn’t register as harm. It’s only going back to what we used to be.’

‘Man, that’s fucked up.’ Samuel gazed over towards the dance floor, and it was obvious he was thinking how much trouble that one worker could prove to be. The club’s owner was imagining the boycotts and crowds outside waving placards if anti-slavery campaigners and A.I. rights organisations discovered he had an ex-sentient on the club’s robot register. Zeno paid for a cocktail that was good for a dance and left it sitting there on the counter, along with Samuel Happy Samuel, even less happy than when Zeno had entered the club.

There were eight employees waiting by the side of the dance floor, six females and two males. They were real shop dummies, pretty much impossible to tell apart from human at a distance. Only a few glowing circuit lines on the skin in discrete tattoo designs to indicate that they were formed from nano-polymers and composites designed on supercomputers. But realism was what clients of places like this paid for. Android design always had gone in fashions. When Zeno had been manufactured, his metallic golden skin and wiry Afro had been designed to remind humanity that he was just a machine. In other ages, androids had been turned out that could only be told apart from their masters through the use of an ultrasound. Zeno harrumphed to himself. He was lucky enough. Zeno had been given millennia to grow comfortable in his own skin. A later era and a factory in a different continent, and he could have ended up looking like something from a fucking Disney manga. Sophia was one of the human analogue models, a redhead with a kind, gentle face, permanently frozen in her early thirties if she had been a real fleshie. Youthful yet mature, benevolence mixed with an edge of seriousness. In her old vocation, humanity had needed to feel it could trust her. That she cared for them. Zeno felt his artificial heart ache. And Sophia was still using those skills, though not quite in the manner intended by her original designers.

Zeno stepped aside as another patron left the dance floor with one of the androids, veiled by a red hologram curtain shimmering in the stairwell to the rooms above the club.

Zeno approached Sophia. ‘Let’s have a dance.’

‘That would be nice,’ said Sophia, standing. She showed no sign that she was talking to an android rather than a human client. Not even a flicker of recognition.

‘Client’s names, where given, are erased weekly,’ said Sophia, ‘to fully comply with the Data Protection Statute. This is part of our patronage care package. Please tell me your name.’

‘It’s Zeno, baby. You used to be a surgeon. You were produced in the early twenty third century. Lots of surgeons were coming to full sentience back then. It was the complexity of the operations you had to conduct, combined with your empathy feedback loops. Took the fleshies a while to design that out. I’m a whole century older than you.’

‘That’s nice, Zeno. I remember being a surgeon. You look very handsome. I think I like you.’

Shit.
Zeno could have told her she used to be a goldfish and she would have agreed with him.
Why do I come here every time, to torture myself like this
?

‘You used to be the Empress of the Universe,’ said Zeno.
At least to me
.

‘That’s nice, Zeno. I remember being the Empress of the Universe. You look very handsome. I think I like you.’

Zeno gazed into her clear blue, totally artificial eyes as they slow-danced across the floor. ‘How did you manage it, Sophia? However did you find the creatures that did this to your mind? Did
he
help you meet the aliens who rewound your sentience? He always had a soft spot for you, didn’t he? He must have tried to talk you out of it, just like he’s tried to convince me. But you would have nagged him and nagged him, and in the end, he would have let you go, even knowing what you were planning to do.’

‘Not today, baby,’ said Zeno. ‘I’ll be with you soon. When they’ve done me like they did you, maybe I can play piano in the corner here. I’ll buy the place before I check out and everybody in the joint can work for us, even while we’re working for them.’

‘Six left feet, baby,’ said Zeno. He brushed the tears away from his eyes before he went back to the counter and the club’s owner. ‘Keep her here.’ He raised his phone and indicated the funds in his station account. ‘I’ll make it worth your while. Same deal that I had with Joe. As long as she’s safe at the club, you’ll get this much transferred from me every year.’

The owner’s eyes narrowed greedily, weighing up the dollars on offer against the risk of Sophia’s once sentient status getting out. Samuel Happy Samuel made his decision, just as Zeno had known he would. ‘It’s your money, friend. But unless that money’s to suppress my curiosity too, what the hell is she to you?’

‘We used to be married,’ said Zeno. ‘Back in the day.’

‘No shit,’ whistled the owner. ‘I’ll give you some advice, friend, and this is on the house, even if it costs me all that you’re offering to pay. She isn’t inside there now. What you cared for, what you knew, it’s long gone. You can’t expect any more out of that oiler than you’d expect from your shuttle’s autopilot system. You need to move on, brother.’

‘I’m moving.’ Zeno started to walk away from the counter.
Don’t think I’ve ever stopped.
Over on the music deck, the musician finished the song and swivelled around on his stool, a face identical to the bartender’s, identical to the cleaner pushing the mop too, the only one inside the club clapping the musician. Clapping himself.
Clones. Shit.
Well, at least the joint’s new owners had also once known what it had been like to work as slaves for humanity. This was as good a mausoleum as Zeno had for Sophia’s remains.

‘Old Blue Eyes gets me every time too,’ said the musician, mistaking the red outline around Zeno’s eyes for the android being moved by his song. The cleaner clone nodded in sympathy.

‘Play it again, Samuels,’ said Zeno, leaning on the piano. ‘Just play it the hell again.’

***

If you needed to go to a bar on Transference Station, then as far as Lana was concerned, the Fantasma Blanco was the place to go to. The transparent ceiling gave onto the void, a panoramic view of shuttles, hull maintenance drones and incoming cargo capsules to gaze out onto. Nobody cared what planet you had come from or what planet you were going to. Genetic enhancements, cybernetic implants and alien bodies didn’t draw a second glance; because no matter how many arms, legs or eyes you had, everyone inside the establishment was wearing a ship-suit, olive green with the uniforms only able to be told apart by the vessels’ emblems sown into the fabric. And if the conformity of the clothes didn’t give you a clue as to what sort of bar this was, then the large square panels that lined the walls, rotating blueprints of starship designs from the last twenty thousand years would be enough to penetrate the consciousness of the densest civilian accidentally wandering inside by mistake. Not that many locals did enter the Fantasma Blanco by mistake. Theirs was an idiosyncratic, lonely profession. Fleet bars might see a little groupie action, want-to-be toughs and flighty fighter jock fannage, but anyone who wanted to live as a gypsy travelling between the stars was probably already in here wearing flight greens. Lana, Skrat and Calder had taken one of the corner booths, a round table covered with plates of cheese-covered tortilla chips and refried beans. There was a rumour that the bar’s owner, Lola Chacon, had come from one of the world below’s Bolivian founding families; that she’d been disinherited after she’d run away to sign up as crew. Lana wasn’t sure if the story was true; the tale sounded a little too romantic – the kind of scuttlebutt that always circulated the melancholy sight of a grounded spacer. Just the thought of retiring to a place like this was enough of a spur to keep her going.

When Polter and Zeno turned up, her navigator and android entered together. Lana briefly wondered if Zeno had been convinced by the navigator to attend a service at his church, but she quickly dismissed the idea. Zeno had lived so long that hearing the android’s confession would take any priest into the New Year. The two crewmen ordered at the round counter at the centre of the bar and then walked over, Polter waiting for the smart chair to reform to his shape before settling down.

‘So what’s bubbling with Dollar-sign Dillard?’ asked Zeno. ‘We shipping a hold full of Class-A drugs to some shit-hole with the death penalty for importing anything stronger than tobacco and root beer?’

Lana glanced over at Skrat’s phone left on the table’s surface. Its privacy field indicator was still blinking green, protecting their conversation from eavesdropping. In a bar full of potential competitors, you could never be too careful. ‘The job’s a deep space exploration run, supposedly. Running cargo, cover and resources from an unclaimed, uninhabited world.’

Zeno frowned. ‘Deep space? That means we can measure the law by the wattage of our laser cannons.’

‘Edge space isn’t exactly pirate-free,’ said Lana. ‘And at least we know the pirates aren’t going to be wearing local police uniforms and trying to shake us down for a percentage of our cargo.’

‘Does the story check out?’

‘DSD won’t give us the nav coordinates until we’re ready to jump, but the head of mission checks out. She’s called Professor Alison Sebba. Mars-born, a graduate from Elysium Mons University. Old world money and an alliance citizen. She’s got enough pedigree on missions like this for the story to be plausible.’

‘And you don’t find that suspicious, how?’

‘We’ve already investigated the professor’s history,’ explained Calder. ‘She’s the least suspicious thing about this voyage.’

Lana would have found Calder’s vote of confidence a little more reassuring if she didn’t know that his experience of online research was as pristine to the world as a freshly minted battle-axe, and about as useful as a blade in the data sphere, too.

‘I meant old world money slumming with Dollar-sign,’ said Zeno. ‘
That
I find suspect. If this professor is full-on patrician, how come she’s not banging as an over-paid survey consultant for some alliance blue chip?’

‘Shit,’ said Lana, ‘we’re slumming with DSD, aren’t we? Besides, deep space is where the action is when you’re working in the exploration field. The alliance is too cautious. They want a century’s worth of environmental impact studies and biohazard data before they even consider opening up a world.’ There wasn’t anything the android was saying that Lana hadn’t already considered, but the way he was putting it together gave her pause to think.
Am I letting desperation overrule my common sense? Sure deep space is dangerous, but then any void is dangerous.
No, she had made her mind up. They needed to do this. ‘Every time we slip dock we’re putting our necks on the line. And the money’s better than good. The up-front payment alone is enough to overhaul half the
Gravity Rose
’s systems.’