U.E.S. Indiana Jones
201.-11
Sometimes, Santiago wished his brain would just shut up.
He’d been right in the middle of the perfect date—dreaming, of course; but hey, who didn’t?—a night of high stakes gambling in Las Vegas with a gorgeous blond Venutian—the new type being grown in the black market crèche pools on the Paradise World for the big timers down Earthside: mouthwatering blonde; dark skin that was the perfect blend of oriental, African, and Latina, smoothed out with some anglo genes; eyes the color of amber, or gold, depended on the light; and full lips that were just begging for attention—anyways, the point was the flaca was perfect. And he’d been perfect too, at craps, poker, black jack, Martian Hold’em . . . he hadn’t been able to touch a chip or card without walking away a whole order of magnitude richer. Gambling was one of the few pastimes that made Santiago grateful for his brain; the rest of the time, his super-sized cranium was more trouble than it was worth. No matter what the bigwigs at New Harvard claimed.
The point was, it had been the best kind of dream: way too good to be true. The kind of dream that could only be cooked up by the cocktail of drugs the U.E.S. Indiana Jones’ medic had force-fed him somewhere around Jupiter. Not that they’d had to—after that last slingshot past the Big Guy, Santiago had been bored enough to actually try striking up a conversation with the other flesh and blood weirdos that wandered around the ship—he’d slipped the IV without a moment’s hesitation. Not that his efforts at socializing had gotten anywhere. The only female-type in the whole ship who wasn’t crew—he’d made a promise to himself, years ago, not to get involved with Navy women—was some quantum physicist who was wider than she was tall. Not that he was shallow or anything.
201.-11
Sometimes, Santiago wished his brain would just shut up.
He’d been right in the middle of the perfect date—dreaming, of course; but hey, who didn’t?—a night of high stakes gambling in Las Vegas with a gorgeous blond Venutian—the new type being grown in the black market crèche pools on the Paradise World for the big timers down Earthside: mouthwatering blonde; dark skin that was the perfect blend of oriental, African, and Latina, smoothed out with some anglo genes; eyes the color of amber, or gold, depended on the light; and full lips that were just begging for attention—anyways, the point was the flaca was perfect. And he’d been perfect too, at craps, poker, black jack, Martian Hold’em . . . he hadn’t been able to touch a chip or card without walking away a whole order of magnitude richer. Gambling was one of the few pastimes that made Santiago grateful for his brain; the rest of the time, his super-sized cranium was more trouble than it was worth. No matter what the bigwigs at New Harvard claimed.
The point was, it had been the best kind of dream: way too good to be true. The kind of dream that could only be cooked up by the cocktail of drugs the U.E.S. Indiana Jones’ medic had force-fed him somewhere around Jupiter. Not that they’d had to—after that last slingshot past the Big Guy, Santiago had been bored enough to actually try striking up a conversation with the other flesh and blood weirdos that wandered around the ship—he’d slipped the IV without a moment’s hesitation. Not that his efforts at socializing had gotten anywhere. The only female-type in the whole ship who wasn’t crew—he’d made a promise to himself, years ago, not to get involved with Navy women—was some quantum physicist who was wider than she was tall. Not that he was shallow or anything.
So, basically, the dream had been a welcome relief. Until his brain had to go and mess it all up, that is. He’d been on the brink of a winning throw, the dice rattling in his hand, when the flaca had leaned forward and whispered in his ear—so close those perfect lips actually tickled, mind—“We’re decelerating at one g.”
“You outta your mind, chata,” he’d replied, grinning and rattling the dice some more, “I’m just warming up.”
But then he threw the dice, and instead of bouncing around on the table like they should have, they zipped across the board, fell to the floor, and kept on rolling until they hit the far wall, fifty meters away . . . exactly like they would have if they’d been experiencing one g of lateral deceleration.
He’d turned around, ready to give the Venutian an earful for breaking his concentration, when suddenly the vibrations started, like hands running up his legs and back in a gentle massage, and he’d thought for a millisecond that the Venutian was going to work on him—they were trained in that kind of thing—but no, she’d been a good half meter away from him, perfect hands at her side, full lips quirked in a knowing smile.
“You’d better wake up and find out when we’ll arrive at our destination.”
“Screw you sister”—at least, he meant to say that, but suddenly it wasn’t the Venutian anymore, but his mamita, hands on hips, squeezed into the Venutian’s tube dress.
“Santiago Zambrano Alcaraz, you wake ¡este momento! ¿Me escuchas? ¡Este momento!”
“Shut up, brain, er . . . mom? ¡Callete!”
But by then it was too late. With his mamita still screaming at him in the back of his mind, he cracked an eyelid, and the cold light of the Jones slapped him across the cornea. He squeezed his throbbing eye shut with a moan that rattled through his teeth, and fumbled for his sleeping bag’s zipper. And his brain, his brain wouldn’t stop yammering at him. The rhythmic pulsing that he was still vainly trying to pretend was the Venutian’s small hands working on his cramped muscles was rolling through the Jones’ bulkhead every 2.5 seconds, interlaced with a slower rumble that cycled through his aching body every 13.75 seconds, so loud that he could hear it. As if knowing that did any good. As if his vaunted brain was any help ninety-five percent of the time!
Almost smugly, his brain told him the deceleration was increasing, nearing 1.5 gs and still climbing. That little tidbit brought an involuntary frown to his face. 1.5 gs? At that rate, they’d have come to a complete stop in—his brain chortled and dove into the physics—in roughly 52.4897959184 seconds.
Unfortunately, it was at that moment that his hand—still functioning largely without higher direction because 50% of Santiago’s brain was asleep and the other 50% was cheerily crunching numbers—found the zipper and pulled. Hard. It was also at that exact moment that Santiago remembered that he’d ignored the boson’s stern warning to secure his sleeping bag to the bulkhead labeled with a big black 1, not the one labeled 2—a warning that he had promptly ignored, just to show the Navy muscle he could. After all, in null gravity, who cared?
The deceleration forces ripped him out of his bag with a strangled shout, and 0.521640530957 seconds later he slammed into the 1 bulkhead. Of course, half a millisecond before he actually hit the wall the Navy jerks up on the bridge decided to cut the burn, so instead of sticking to the bulkhead like he should have, he was bounced, screaming profanity the whole way, back towards 2 bulkhead, which he struck with enough force to finally shake the Venutian flaca from his brain and send her spinning back to Venus once and for all. He only barely managed to wrap his hand around one of the straps on his sleeping pouch, which kept him from dribbling back and forth between the bulkheads like a human basketball.
For a second he just hung there, contemplating the cruel nature of the universe, shoulder screaming at him like his mamita had been only a few seconds ago, his hand that had grabbed the strap burning. He was sure it was bleeding. He just didn’t want to look. His head was rattling and spinning like the dice he’d been throwing in his dream. He had to blink half a dozen times just to bring the cramped cabin into focus. Was that his blood on the far wall?
He ran his trembling free hand across his forehead, and then grimaced at the red stains on his fingers. More of his blood was floating free in the air between the bulkheads in shimmering spheres that looked like wine. Good wine, too. Maybe a Montpelier 1997.
“Lights at fifty percent,” he said. The room dimmed, and he hooked his left leg around the pouch so he could shake the sting out of his hand. “Exterior view on screen one.”
To his right, the cabin’s media console came alive, the main screen brightening into an impressive star field. Some people might have paused a moment to gaze at the . . . 147,678 stars that were visible in just this tiny slice of the universe, but Santiago didn’t care much about the view.
“Augment,” he commanded, and suddenly the starscape was overlain with a hundred different colors, texts, and lines. The pinpricks of light were separated by color into stars, galaxies, nebulae, planetoids, asteroids, unidentified Trans-Neptunian objects, etc. Text blocks that seemed to hover just above the celestial bodies indicated mass, relative velocities, relative distances, ages . . . the list went on. And the lines that swept across the screen tracked the orbits of the 10,000 nearest objects. A normal person probably would have had a coronary just looking at all the data. Santiago, on the other hand, had his brain, and his brain cobbled up everything the computer could shove at him, and more, in the half second it took Santiago to sweep his gaze across the screen.
Thanks to his brain, he knew where he was before the computer had finished painting all of the orbits across the screen. The Kuiper belt, roughly 6 billion klicks from Earth, give or take an astronomic unit. That raised his eyebrow. What in the world was out here? Ice . . . lots of ice.
Shaking his head—ignoring the eight hundred and ninety seven possible locations in the Kuiper belt his brain was suddenly suggesting as the Jones’ destination—Santiago unhooked his leg and pushed away from the wall, angling for the tiny sanitation unit on the bulkhead opposite the media station.
“Music,” he said absently once he reached the sanitation unit. A glance in the mirror, a tiny thing no bigger than his palm, revealed a haggard-faced eighteen year-old with a fan of blood spreading across the right half of his face. Lousy Navy. Some way to treat the world’s smartest person. And that was documented too, no bragging on his part. He had a certificate from the Department of Neurosciences of New Harvard. Where had he put that, anyway?
He groped around the tileplast station till he found the bath wipes, then started cleaning off his face. “Lets hear something from the ‘30s . . . make it alternative rock.”
His eyes drifted back to the screen, which was still tracking orbits and velocities; he barely heard the music, but his brain logged it away anyways. Coldplay, their last album.
Where was the Jones' going?
It had taken a long time for Santiago to get used to his brain. Heck, it still gave him the creeps some times. Who wouldn’t be creeped out by a brain that was faster and smarter than any AI ever invented? Santiago would like to meet the fellow. He’d shake the monse’s hand, tip his hat to him, and then switch brains without breaking a sweat. He really would. Most days, anway.
But now, with that empty starfield making faces at him on the monitor, Santiago’s brain had no answers, and he didn’t like, not one bit. The Navy boys—and the occasional Navy female-type he’d run into on the Jones—had been about as talkative as clams. And compared to the secret police that had busted into his flat in New Washington, three months and six billion kilometers back on Earth, the Navy crew was downright chatty. He grimaced as his brain replayed that night. The visit from the three police—all of them women . . . the nasty kind from the DAR—had gone from bad to worse: a break-in through his apartment window, followed by a long ride in a windowless van, followed by three weeks solitary confinement in a cement box with a bed and toilet, followed by another three weeks of psychological tests that made the hoops the New Harvard had made him jump through seem like cake, followed by a ride up the Western Atlantic Space Elevator, and finally ending with him being shoved into the United Empire Ship Indiana Jones like a sardine with only the clothes on his back . . . and his brain, of course.
He was still wiping at his face. Frowning, he deposited the bloody wipe into the trash recycler, and pushed off back towards the media station. His brain had been his only asset during the psych tests, and yet from those tests he’d learned more about this mission he’d been hijacked into going on than the doctors had learned about him.
The Navy was looking for something. Something that was, apparently, out here in the Kuiper Belt. And whatever it was, they needed a computer expert, the computer expert, to help them deal with it. And whatever it was, they wanted it bad. So bad, in fact, that the DAR—Daughters of the American Revolution, that is—was in on it. And if the secret police were in on it, the Imperial family was in on it. And if the Imps were in on it . . .
Well, if the Imps were in on it, Santiago Zambrano Alcaraz wanted to be in on it.
His brain pointed out, snidely, that the death rate among middle-class citizens that dabbled in Imperial politics was 15.78% higher than their less politically inclined peers, but he ignored it. After all, those statistics didn’t apply to him, a New-Harvard-certificate-carrying genius.
He extended his hands over the computer’s holopad, and the controls flickered to life around his fingers. Zero point two five seconds later he was deep into the Jones’ programming, cruising through lines of codes he doubted any Navy personnel had reviewed in years. Yeah, the DAR secret police might have all but stripped him naked before shoving him onto the ship, but that hadn’t stopped him from hacking into the network through a public, supposedly ‘safe’, terminal, and writing up three- or four-dozen programs that basically put every system on the Jones at his disposal.
Just thinking of how he was suckering the Navy and the DAR made him laugh out loud. Of course, that’s when his brain chose to remind him that he’d been abducted because he was able to do just this sort of thing, and that the Navy probably fully expected him to be doing exactly what he was doing right now, so he wasn’t really pulling a fast one on anybody, and they were probably blocking access to any really crucial systems through subroutines he hadn’t considered yet.
“Shut up you,” he muttered through his teeth. Stupid brain. Why couldn’t it just do as it was told?
Gently, he assumed control of the ship’s passive scanners, and began scrolling through the flood of data that the Jones was pulling in. As the information flooded passed him, his brain whistled in surprise—well, the lipless and soundless equivalent of a whistle at least. And for once, Santiago could only agree.
“Wow.”
“You outta your mind, chata,” he’d replied, grinning and rattling the dice some more, “I’m just warming up.”
But then he threw the dice, and instead of bouncing around on the table like they should have, they zipped across the board, fell to the floor, and kept on rolling until they hit the far wall, fifty meters away . . . exactly like they would have if they’d been experiencing one g of lateral deceleration.
He’d turned around, ready to give the Venutian an earful for breaking his concentration, when suddenly the vibrations started, like hands running up his legs and back in a gentle massage, and he’d thought for a millisecond that the Venutian was going to work on him—they were trained in that kind of thing—but no, she’d been a good half meter away from him, perfect hands at her side, full lips quirked in a knowing smile.
“You’d better wake up and find out when we’ll arrive at our destination.”
“Screw you sister”—at least, he meant to say that, but suddenly it wasn’t the Venutian anymore, but his mamita, hands on hips, squeezed into the Venutian’s tube dress.
“Santiago Zambrano Alcaraz, you wake ¡este momento! ¿Me escuchas? ¡Este momento!”
“Shut up, brain, er . . . mom? ¡Callete!”
But by then it was too late. With his mamita still screaming at him in the back of his mind, he cracked an eyelid, and the cold light of the Jones slapped him across the cornea. He squeezed his throbbing eye shut with a moan that rattled through his teeth, and fumbled for his sleeping bag’s zipper. And his brain, his brain wouldn’t stop yammering at him. The rhythmic pulsing that he was still vainly trying to pretend was the Venutian’s small hands working on his cramped muscles was rolling through the Jones’ bulkhead every 2.5 seconds, interlaced with a slower rumble that cycled through his aching body every 13.75 seconds, so loud that he could hear it. As if knowing that did any good. As if his vaunted brain was any help ninety-five percent of the time!
Almost smugly, his brain told him the deceleration was increasing, nearing 1.5 gs and still climbing. That little tidbit brought an involuntary frown to his face. 1.5 gs? At that rate, they’d have come to a complete stop in—his brain chortled and dove into the physics—in roughly 52.4897959184 seconds.
Unfortunately, it was at that moment that his hand—still functioning largely without higher direction because 50% of Santiago’s brain was asleep and the other 50% was cheerily crunching numbers—found the zipper and pulled. Hard. It was also at that exact moment that Santiago remembered that he’d ignored the boson’s stern warning to secure his sleeping bag to the bulkhead labeled with a big black 1, not the one labeled 2—a warning that he had promptly ignored, just to show the Navy muscle he could. After all, in null gravity, who cared?
The deceleration forces ripped him out of his bag with a strangled shout, and 0.521640530957 seconds later he slammed into the 1 bulkhead. Of course, half a millisecond before he actually hit the wall the Navy jerks up on the bridge decided to cut the burn, so instead of sticking to the bulkhead like he should have, he was bounced, screaming profanity the whole way, back towards 2 bulkhead, which he struck with enough force to finally shake the Venutian flaca from his brain and send her spinning back to Venus once and for all. He only barely managed to wrap his hand around one of the straps on his sleeping pouch, which kept him from dribbling back and forth between the bulkheads like a human basketball.
For a second he just hung there, contemplating the cruel nature of the universe, shoulder screaming at him like his mamita had been only a few seconds ago, his hand that had grabbed the strap burning. He was sure it was bleeding. He just didn’t want to look. His head was rattling and spinning like the dice he’d been throwing in his dream. He had to blink half a dozen times just to bring the cramped cabin into focus. Was that his blood on the far wall?
He ran his trembling free hand across his forehead, and then grimaced at the red stains on his fingers. More of his blood was floating free in the air between the bulkheads in shimmering spheres that looked like wine. Good wine, too. Maybe a Montpelier 1997.
“Lights at fifty percent,” he said. The room dimmed, and he hooked his left leg around the pouch so he could shake the sting out of his hand. “Exterior view on screen one.”
To his right, the cabin’s media console came alive, the main screen brightening into an impressive star field. Some people might have paused a moment to gaze at the . . . 147,678 stars that were visible in just this tiny slice of the universe, but Santiago didn’t care much about the view.
“Augment,” he commanded, and suddenly the starscape was overlain with a hundred different colors, texts, and lines. The pinpricks of light were separated by color into stars, galaxies, nebulae, planetoids, asteroids, unidentified Trans-Neptunian objects, etc. Text blocks that seemed to hover just above the celestial bodies indicated mass, relative velocities, relative distances, ages . . . the list went on. And the lines that swept across the screen tracked the orbits of the 10,000 nearest objects. A normal person probably would have had a coronary just looking at all the data. Santiago, on the other hand, had his brain, and his brain cobbled up everything the computer could shove at him, and more, in the half second it took Santiago to sweep his gaze across the screen.
Thanks to his brain, he knew where he was before the computer had finished painting all of the orbits across the screen. The Kuiper belt, roughly 6 billion klicks from Earth, give or take an astronomic unit. That raised his eyebrow. What in the world was out here? Ice . . . lots of ice.
Shaking his head—ignoring the eight hundred and ninety seven possible locations in the Kuiper belt his brain was suddenly suggesting as the Jones’ destination—Santiago unhooked his leg and pushed away from the wall, angling for the tiny sanitation unit on the bulkhead opposite the media station.
“Music,” he said absently once he reached the sanitation unit. A glance in the mirror, a tiny thing no bigger than his palm, revealed a haggard-faced eighteen year-old with a fan of blood spreading across the right half of his face. Lousy Navy. Some way to treat the world’s smartest person. And that was documented too, no bragging on his part. He had a certificate from the Department of Neurosciences of New Harvard. Where had he put that, anyway?
He groped around the tileplast station till he found the bath wipes, then started cleaning off his face. “Lets hear something from the ‘30s . . . make it alternative rock.”
His eyes drifted back to the screen, which was still tracking orbits and velocities; he barely heard the music, but his brain logged it away anyways. Coldplay, their last album.
Where was the Jones' going?
It had taken a long time for Santiago to get used to his brain. Heck, it still gave him the creeps some times. Who wouldn’t be creeped out by a brain that was faster and smarter than any AI ever invented? Santiago would like to meet the fellow. He’d shake the monse’s hand, tip his hat to him, and then switch brains without breaking a sweat. He really would. Most days, anway.
But now, with that empty starfield making faces at him on the monitor, Santiago’s brain had no answers, and he didn’t like, not one bit. The Navy boys—and the occasional Navy female-type he’d run into on the Jones—had been about as talkative as clams. And compared to the secret police that had busted into his flat in New Washington, three months and six billion kilometers back on Earth, the Navy crew was downright chatty. He grimaced as his brain replayed that night. The visit from the three police—all of them women . . . the nasty kind from the DAR—had gone from bad to worse: a break-in through his apartment window, followed by a long ride in a windowless van, followed by three weeks solitary confinement in a cement box with a bed and toilet, followed by another three weeks of psychological tests that made the hoops the New Harvard had made him jump through seem like cake, followed by a ride up the Western Atlantic Space Elevator, and finally ending with him being shoved into the United Empire Ship Indiana Jones like a sardine with only the clothes on his back . . . and his brain, of course.
He was still wiping at his face. Frowning, he deposited the bloody wipe into the trash recycler, and pushed off back towards the media station. His brain had been his only asset during the psych tests, and yet from those tests he’d learned more about this mission he’d been hijacked into going on than the doctors had learned about him.
The Navy was looking for something. Something that was, apparently, out here in the Kuiper Belt. And whatever it was, they needed a computer expert, the computer expert, to help them deal with it. And whatever it was, they wanted it bad. So bad, in fact, that the DAR—Daughters of the American Revolution, that is—was in on it. And if the secret police were in on it, the Imperial family was in on it. And if the Imps were in on it . . .
Well, if the Imps were in on it, Santiago Zambrano Alcaraz wanted to be in on it.
His brain pointed out, snidely, that the death rate among middle-class citizens that dabbled in Imperial politics was 15.78% higher than their less politically inclined peers, but he ignored it. After all, those statistics didn’t apply to him, a New-Harvard-certificate-carrying genius.
He extended his hands over the computer’s holopad, and the controls flickered to life around his fingers. Zero point two five seconds later he was deep into the Jones’ programming, cruising through lines of codes he doubted any Navy personnel had reviewed in years. Yeah, the DAR secret police might have all but stripped him naked before shoving him onto the ship, but that hadn’t stopped him from hacking into the network through a public, supposedly ‘safe’, terminal, and writing up three- or four-dozen programs that basically put every system on the Jones at his disposal.
Just thinking of how he was suckering the Navy and the DAR made him laugh out loud. Of course, that’s when his brain chose to remind him that he’d been abducted because he was able to do just this sort of thing, and that the Navy probably fully expected him to be doing exactly what he was doing right now, so he wasn’t really pulling a fast one on anybody, and they were probably blocking access to any really crucial systems through subroutines he hadn’t considered yet.
“Shut up you,” he muttered through his teeth. Stupid brain. Why couldn’t it just do as it was told?
Gently, he assumed control of the ship’s passive scanners, and began scrolling through the flood of data that the Jones was pulling in. As the information flooded passed him, his brain whistled in surprise—well, the lipless and soundless equivalent of a whistle at least. And for once, Santiago could only agree.
“Wow.”
