Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,73

building modeled after a ziggurat, “you’ll see the corporate headquarters of EvoTech. They built here on Pallah when prefab structures were all you could get, but they insisted on doing something different with the available options. They flew in architects from Earth proper. And the best they could achieve was a derivative homage of ancient Earth civilizations.” He shook his head in mock resignation. “And this from a company who claims to be on the leading edge of transhumanity.”

It went on like that as we continued to walk, but I tuned him out. Shay was clearly doing the same as I got a ping from Sarah. Ms. Chan wishes to speak with you. Shall I accept?

Yes.

A window popped up in the top-left corner of my vision. I once again was forced to marvel at Shay’s ability in the Net. The image I saw—which should have been built in the same image as her current coil—instead showed a young woman of Asiatic descent with raven-black hair and alabaster skin. It wasn’t the coil she had worn on the Persephone. Now that I understood her dysmorphia and the distress it caused her to be not just in a bio-male body, but a body so far from her birth, I had to wonder; could the avatar she was showing now have been her original equipment? Or based on it, in any event?

“Sorry, Carter,” she said in words only I could hear, transcribed directly from her thoughts and sent from Bit to Sarah on a closed Net. Sarah, in turn, converted the text to electrical impulses that could be used to directly stimulate my auditory nerves, giving us the illusion of speech, though neither of us made a sound. “I don’t know how he managed to sneak up on me. Or how he managed to cut Bit off from the Net.”

There was real contrition in her voice—a remarkable technical feat but also an understandable reaction. Overwatch, physical and electronic, had been her responsibility and she clearly felt guilty over her perceived failure. “Don’t worry about it,” I replied. “This Korben guy is good. And he’s got the full backing of Genetechnic. We’re lucky he didn’t just terminate our coils and fry our cores. Besides, maybe we have a chance now.”

“Sure.” Shay’s avatar frowned. “A chance to help Genetechnic clean up their mess and if we’re lucky prevent the apocalypse. You get that that’s what we’re dealing with here, right? The end of civilization as we know it? If these nanites get out…”

It was a line I’d heard in previous lives. The fate of the world was at stake. Life, liberty, and the Solarian way would fall if someone didn’t act. It was the clarion call of nationalism and idealism, the thought that the people who looked like you, sounded like you, and grew up in the same microcosm as you had to be right. Right because they thought the way that you thought and their worldview matched your own. And if they were right, then those who thought different were, by process of elimination, wrong. And it was the sacred duty of those in the right to spread the truth far and wide.

By the sword, if necessary.

The habs might be politically autonomous, but they formed relationships and alliances just like any other government. And those alliances needed the ability to project force, to show their power. They needed the ability to defend themselves and, in some cases, to claim by strength of arms that which they thought was rightfully theirs. They needed the ability to show their neighbors that they were no easy meat. They packaged it in political terms, of course. Mutual defense pacts. Peacekeeping forces. Unification efforts.

Freedom imposed at the end of a gun barrel.

I’d believed it once upon a time, been willing to die for it. Been willing to kill for it. And then, one morning, I’d woken up and I… hadn’t been. Nothing ever changed. The polities kept playing at politics and the people who just wanted to live their lives paid the price and all the while the megacorps kept raking in the credits. And those who did the actual work ended up reviled as often as they did revered. The day came when I just couldn’t bring myself to care, to put on the uniform and stand the watch. Better to leave it to younger, more passionate people. That was when my career in repo had started and salvage hadn’t been too far off.

But this time felt different.