“That’s another three coolness points,” Mina interjected.
“-and I handled the trolls without getting hurt.”
“There was another fight we missed?” Kara said. “What happened? Can we see? You do have a flight recorder, right?”
The captain put his hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you show them the highlights, Alice? I need to get back to the bridge, but you enjoy your party. Jim, could I have a word?”
“You have recordings? Awesome! Come on, girl. Sit yourself down in the seat of honor, and queue it up while we cut the cake.”
“Yeah. But only the parts that make you look cool, right?”
I spent the rest of the evening there, surrounded by new friends, stuffing myself with amazing food while we laughed and joked and traded stories. Everyone in the crew seemed to have a lot of those, and I found myself playing a few more recordings to keep up. Naoko’s encounter with the hexagator. Some highlights from my trip across Felicity’s jungles. It wasn’t much compared to Chief West’s war stories, or the foxgirls’ adventures as aspiring data thieves. But it was enough to make me feel like maybe, somehow, I might actually fit in here.
Chapter 9
It was a three-day trip to Zanfeld, and I got to spend most of it learning and hanging out with the techs.
The passengers all retreated into their suites once we left port, just like Naoko had predicted. She was still kept pretty busy fielding customer service requests, since the Hoshidans were a bunch of spoiled brats who expected to indulge any weird whim they might get 24/7. But she was just helping their serfs make things happen, so it was a manageable job.
I helped out now and then by answering the com when she was busy, but I never saw the passengers face to face. The few times I talked to their serfs they all seemed terrified of me. I couldn’t quite decide whether to feel vindicated or annoyed. I wanted to be dangerous, but darn it, I wasn’t some monster who went around hurting harmless serf girls.
Jenna advised me to ignore the whole thing.
“Once we drop these people off on Zanfeld you’ll never see them again, so who cares what they think? Spacers aren’t going to react like that, if they bother to look into your history at all. That reminds me, though, we need to get you signed up with an agitprop service.”
“A what?” She’d completely lost me with that one.
“She’s talking about search obfuscators,” Mina explained. “You know, so people can’t just do a datanet search on your ID code and get your whole life story?” She paused to take in my expression. “You’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Not a clue,” I admitted. “Why wouldn’t I want people to be able to do searches on me? Shouldn’t I want a good reputation?”
“Yeah, but you don’t want to get convicted for it,” Jenna said.
“Exactly,” Mina said. “A lot of colonies have really crazy laws, Alice. If your personal history isn’t obfuscated some of them will accept public data as legal evidence, and that’s bad. Say you go to a club on Zanfeld and have a few drinks, and someone posts a video somewhere. Then three months later you leave the port zone on Clarity, and some bored cop decides to harass you and runs a crime search. Bam, now you’re in a local jail on drug use charges.”
“They’d arrest me for something I did in another colony?”
“Reasonable people wouldn’t, but the crazy colonies can get really crazy. A big part of our business is going places the big corporations won’t touch, so we have to be careful about that kind of thing.”
“Besides, it’s fun,” Jenna added. “Open accounts with a couple of agitprop services, and they’ll spread any crazy stories you want. Usually what you do is have them create five or six separate false histories for you, each with a different personality. Make sure one of them includes lots of really outrageous fake crime reports, and you can claim anything real is obviously part of this malicious character assassination.”
“Or you could just have them manufacture legitimate doubt about your activities,” Mina added. “The captain pays a service to tamper with public data about the Square Deal, and they’ll automatically include you in the basic obscurement. So, for example, in a month there will be a bunch of different versions of the news stories about yesterday floating around different data stores, and the key details will all contradict each other. There will also be data showing the Square Deal being in three or four other ports at the same time, and probably some completely fake news reports to go along with the false trails.”
“Yeah, but it’s a lot more fun when you can tell them what kind of reports to post,” Jenna said. “For that you have to open an account of your own.”
“That sounds expensive,” I protested. “I don’t have a lot of money.”
“It’s not that bad. They have specialized AIs that do all the work, and they’re just class two’s so their time is cheap. You can get a basic account for maybe two or three credits a month.”
“I guess I’ll look into it.”
The techs filled me in on a lot of things I’d never known. I kind of felt like they were babysitting me, but they didn’t seem to mind. I think they got a kick out of educating a human.
They didn’t just lecture me about things, either. They got really excited when I mentioned that I was interested in engineering, and after that they made a habit of dragging me all over the ship’s engineering spaces to ‘help out’ while we chatted about everything from merchant law to spacer fashion.
I’m pretty sure a normal girl would have hated the giant maze of cold, dark passages that tunneled in and around the giant machines that made the Square Deal run. I loved it. The tech’s domain was full of amazing sights, especially to my senses. I got to watch them service a drive tube, and rebuild a fusion reactor’s fuel injector, and all kinds of other cool stuff. I didn’t know enough to be much help yet, but even holding Jenna’s tools while she worked was fascinating.
The first time we did that I had to spend the whole time in my spacesuit, since the parts of engineering that weren’t in vacuum had a nitrogen atmosphere to minimize corrosion. It was also pretty cold in places, since the ship’s holds and idle systems were kept at a chilly six degrees Celsius. Active systems like the fusion reactors and navigational deflectors were a lot warmer, but they made up a pretty small fraction of the ship.