It was Tyson Abington’s favorite part of the day: when a hush came over the office tower as its occupants filed out from another day’s labors for a night of well-earned relaxation with their friends and loved ones.
For Tyson, it was one of the few moments of calm during the day when he could reflect and appreciate everything he and long generations of his family had built. His two-meter frame stood up against the transparent aluminum observation window of his penthouse office, close enough he almost left a nose print on the cool metal.
The transparent metal was ten centimeters thick, yet clear as a still pond. It was seamless, and required no structural bracing, being more than strong enough to carry unaided the weight of the dozen engineering floors and communications antennas above it. Both electrical power and data passed through it wirelessly. The optical clarity and lack of framing made the illusion that the ceiling was simply floating overhead incredibly convincing. It was easy to forget the “glass” was there at all. An expensive illusion to create, but on nights like this, Tyson knew the extravagance had been worth every nudollar.
The space took up the entire two hundred and eighty-eighth floor of the Immortal Tower in the heart of downtown Methuselah, capital of the entire planet of Lazarus. The nomenclature sounded ominous, but its history was quite innocent, bordering on cheeky. At the dawn of the company, Tyson’s forbearer, the legendary Reginald Abington, had been a brilliant engineer and savvy businessman. He’d been the first to perfect and patent an industrial-scale method to condense negative matter using overlapping gravity wave interference. The resulting company was named Abington Gravitonic Engineering, or AGE for short. Over the generations, AGE became Ageless Corp., and once Ageless set up shop on its very own colony world, well, the names sort of picked themselves.
For reasons of pride and exclusivity, the Immortal Tower was the tallest building in Methuselah. It would remain so in perpetuity, on account the Abington family owned all of the airspace above seven hundred and fifty meters inside the city limits, and anyone that wanted to build above that height had to pay a monthly licensing fee that increased logarithmically with each additional floor.
Technically, Ageless owned the airspace, as all the transtellars were publicly traded companies by law. But the Abingtons had managed to maintain a controlling interest over the centuries through clever maneuvering and more than one “incentivized” marriage proposal. Ageless wasn’t the largest transtellar, or the wealthiest, but it was one of the oldest, and the most stable. It had provided for its customers, shareholders, and employees in equal measure for centuries. Tyson took immense pride in his family legacy, and felt the weight of his responsibilities as its newest steward every day.
He inhaled deeply, the native air laced with the slight copper smell that somehow survived even the best HEPA filtration. Between the shield mountain ranges that protected Methuselah from the gale winds of the rest of the planet’s equatorial regions, the pulsing heart of the city spread out before him. It was electric with trains of transport pods, buzzing drones, and blinking pedestrian crossings. The lower commercial and residential districts mingled with green patches of parks, and blue rivers cut through the entertainment district both to provide recreation and cooler temperatures in the city’s hot summers. Thin, needlelike towers raced up to the seven-hundred-fifty-meter “ceiling,” many connected by a latticework of aerial walkways that let the people working inside save the trouble of going all the way down to street level and up again just to attend a meeting.
Stretching down Shensing Boulevard directly in front of him, “Embassy Row” played host to the Lazarus headquarters of the other major transtellars, as well as two towers jointly owned by half a dozen of the smaller consortiums. It also had the only two legitimate embassies on the entire planet: the UN embassy representing the interests of the governments of Earth, and the Xre embassy, which had stood empty since the day it had been built more than seventy years earlier. Tyson considered them both equally egregious wastes of high-value real estate, even if he never voiced the thought publicly.
Methuselah was a thriving company town of almost six million people and nearly as many AIs. A blooming city in the desert.
His city.
Tyson often fancied himself a gardener in concrete and steel, tending to a forest of commerce. Things grew tall on Lazarus. With only three-fifths of Earth’s gravity, everything from plants to people to buildings to rockets had an easier time reaching for the sky.
Which made it all the more surprising when things came crashing back down again. An alert in a search algorithm he’d programmed into the office during the first hour of his occupancy flashed in the window. The trading day was over, but overnight trades were projecting a sudden drop in Ageless’s stock price of sixty-three nudollars, well outside the typical background variation.
At that exact moment, a camera drone flying the colors and symbol of the Interstellar News Network dropped down from somewhere above his floor and hovered at eye level, recording his facial expression with its binocular cameras in gloriously unflattering UHD.
“Sir, there’s a problem,” the voice of his personal assistant, Paris, said almost simultaneously.
“Yes, there’s an INN drone violating the airspace outside my office, for starters.”
“Of course, sir. Let me just…”
A second later, a micro missile little bigger than a pen came screeching down from a Triple-A battery on the roof, struck the camera drone dead center, and blew it into four spinning pieces. Tyson watched them tumble toward the ground for a moment, then returned his attention to the matter at hand.
“Thank you, Paris,” Tyson said, the warm feeling in his stomach instantly replaced with ice in his veins. “Bring yourself onscreen, please.”
Paris’s false-depth image assembled itself from wire frame to full rendering in less than a second, her svelte body, tailored business suit, horn-rimmed glasses, and pinned-back hair hovering on the other side of the clear aluminum window like a particularly alluring ghost.
“What’s happened?” he asked. “Why are we down sixty points an hour after the bell?”
“Sixty-three,” she corrected. She was very precise. AIs always were. “A bulk freighter, the Preakness, just arrived from our colony in Teegarden’s Star. There’s been a bacterial outbreak among the colonists. So far, the strain has proven resistant to all available antibiotic treatments.”
Teegarden’s Star hardly ranked as a proper colony. None of the little red dwarf’s four planets were candidates for terraforming, nor their moons. But the night side of the tidally locked innermost planet was a veritable gold mine of rare earths and precious metals. Body-for-body, the mining operation there was one of the more lucrative operations Ageless had going in human-controlled space, even if it was only a small percentage of the company’s total revenue stream.
“How many employees are infected?”
“Well, all of them, sir,” Paris said with uncharacteristic hesitation. “There have already been three fatalities.”
“Fatalities?” Tyson barked uncomprehendingly. “From a bacteria?”
“It appears to be quite virulent. And it’s proven difficult to isolate, due to an airborne vector.”
“How many employees in situ?”
“Three hundred and six, not including the three fatalities.”
“Shit! How are we only hearing about this now?”
“Shipments to and from Teegarden occur quarterly, sir. This was the first ship to come from there in two and a half months.”
“Why wasn’t a skip courier sent immediately?” Tyson raged.
“…”
“Well?”
“The board of directors decided a permanently attached skip boat was an ‘unnecessary extravagance’ for a stable, low-priority outpost, sir. You signed the recall yourself.”
“I did?”
“Yes, sir. Last year.”
Tyson blushed. “Fine, rescind that order immediately. How did someone else hear this report from my ship before I did?”
“Are we sure that happened?”
“Your software has a better explanation for the sixty-three-point drop in our overnights?”
“No, sir. I suppose not.”
“Well then? Who read this first and how?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Abington,” Paris said. She only used “Mr. Abington” when he was pushing her too hard. Tyson tried to calm himself.
“I’m sorry, Paris. It’s not your fault, of course. Just … dig into the network and see what you can find out. Bribe some of the other AIs if you have to. I’m releasing five hundred thousand to your discretionary account.”
“Thank you, sir. I will do my best.”
“I know.” He rubbed a temple. “Call up a dozen of our best infectologists and epidemiologists and get them on a fast courier boat back to Teegarden. Full hazard pay for the duration and a five-thousand-share bonus when they fix this thing. Get them all the gear they ask for. And make sure it’s all in the press release. We need to be proactive about this thing and make sure everyone sees us doing it.”
“Of course, sir. That’s an excellent response. There’s just one item you’re overlooking.”
“And that is?”
“The bulk freighter, sir.”
“Yes? What about it?”
“It needs to be quarantined, both the cargo and the crew.”
“But we’ll lose an entire quarter’s worth of revenue from the mines!”
“And if we don’t, we risk losing Methuselah, maybe all of Lazarus. Well, you squishy meat puppets at the least.”
“Was that a joke, Paris?”
“I’ve been practicing. Was it good?”
“It was morbid.” Tyson rubbed a fresh knot at the back of his neck. “The cargo modules aren’t pressurized on an ore freighter. There’s no need to waste the air or energy keeping the cargo warm. Can’t we at least off-load the haul?”
“There are currently six thousand, three hundred and forty-seven different bacterial spores known to medical science that can survive in the hard vacuum and radiation environment of interstellar space for extended durations. Without having catalogued this strain, we can’t know if it shares that capabili—”
“Yes, yes, all right.” Tyson swore under his breath. The value of the ore in orbit was a paltry sum compared to the quarter’s bottom line, but it was the appearance of the thing. Just letting an entire megaton shipment languish in a parking orbit over his own capital was like tying an albatross around his own neck. He’d be hearing about it at lunches and whispered at charity events until it was sorted. But, there was nothing for it. Paris was right, damn her software. The downsides would be catastrophic if the dice didn’t land in his favor.
“Quarantine the crew and the shipment. Make sure that’s in the press release, too. Along with hazard pay for the duration and thousand-share bonuses for the crew. Make sure they want for nothing while they’re locked up in that flea-trap.”
“Very good, sir.”
“And Paris?”
“Sir?”
“There’s a memory upgrade in it for you if you find whoever leaked this before it reached me.”
“And an android carapace?”
“Are you negotiating with me, Paris?”
“I would never, sir. But, my Download Day is coming up in two months, and…”
Tyson smiled, despite himself. “And an android carapace.”
Paris nodded her perfectly sculpted virtual chin. “Thank you, sir. I won’t fail you.”
“I know.” Tyson turned his attention back to his city, and marveled at how quickly night fell in the valley.