Bits Of Anarchy (EarthCent Metaverse Book 1), page 1
Bits of Anarchy
Book One of EarthCent Metaverse
Copyright 2022 by E. M. Foner
One
Mouser blinked when the overhead lighting in his workshop came on at full brightness. He returned the soldering iron to its holder, placed the antique circuit board in a silvery antistatic bag, and swiveled on his faux-antique workbench stool to see who had entered.
“Sorry to interrupt, but it’s important,” said the visitor. She was in her early thirties and dressed in a conservative business suit, making her an anomaly among the planet’s residents. “It can’t wait until the next Rules Committee meeting.”
“I forgot to stop for lunch and now I’m hungry,” the older man said, patting his paunch. “How about we discuss it over pizza?”
“There’s no room in the budget,” Rayne replied
“For a vending machine pizza? Remind me again why I signed up for the Rules Committee.”
“You didn’t sign up. We pulled your name out of a digital hat and the drawing was fixed. No, it’s better you stay seated,” she added, settling herself on the ancient leather couch that was stained with the spilled drinks of excited role players from thousands of gaming sessions. “We’re broke.”
“You’re the treasurer,” Mouser said. “Offer everybody a discount if they prepay for the next year’s air supply or up the fee on this weekend’s hack-a-thon.”
“I’m not talking about being short of pizza money for an informal meeting,” Rayne told him. “I had to rob the royalty accounts to make the planetary lease payment this morning. If we had a government on Bits, it would be falling as we speak.”
“You have access to the royalty accounts? I thought that the programming teams were completely independent.”
“I didn’t use the word ‘rob’ for the sake of exaggeration.”
“Oh.” Mouser got up and went to the small fridge. “Soda?”
“How can you drink soda at a time like this? When everybody finds out what I did they’re going to throw me out an airlock.”
“The atmosphere is thin, but it won’t kill you, at least not right away,” Mouser said, bringing her an imported aluminum can of grape soda. “Breathe slow and come around to the spaceport entrance and I’ll let you back in. Besides, I remember something like this happening around twenty years ago. We all tightened our belts for a few months, and when the tithes caught up, the Rules Committee paid back the money they borrowed.”
“You’re not getting it.” Rayne pulled back the tab on her soda can and took a long sip. “Our income has been on a slow downward slope ever since the Gem Empire collapsed, and things really started falling off the cliff after the Traitors left three years ago. We’ve blown through the rainy day fund, the solar flare fund, and the apocalypse fund. Even if everybody agreed to double the tithe, there’s just not enough royalties and paying work coming in to save up for the next lease payment, not to mention importing the essentials like—” she took another sip, “—canned soda from Earth.”
“I thought that the Hortens leased us the planet on a per-head basis,” Mouser said. “Didn’t our payment take a big drop when we lost ten percent of our population to Flower?”
“If you add the retirees to Earth and the people leaving for open worlds or Stryx stations in the last decade, our payment has dropped by almost twenty percent, but the problem is on the income side.”
“Why? I’ve got a backlog of repairs that will last longer than I do, and everybody I know is working all of the time.”
“They’re playing games all of the time. It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s beta testing,” Mouser protested. “You wouldn’t want the programming teams shipping buggy products and destroying our reputation.”
“Sales are shrinking,” Rayne said, putting her can down on the low coffee table that was covered with ring stains. She began ticking off facts on her fingers. “The only Gem buying updates to Cloner these days are the ones who were on the wrong side of their revolution, and they’ve been losing interest ever since the New Gem Empire started bringing back males.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I was working ground control and the head of EarthCent Intelligence visited with a young Stryx to warn us about the collapse of the Gem Empire?”
“Many times, and stop trying to change the subject,” the treasurer said, looking at her fingers and trying to remember where she had left off. “The charity jobs we used to get from aliens to do low-level coding for gadgets or to add human-compatible interfaces to equipment for contract workers has dried up. It turns out the Traitors were the ones with the contacts to bring that work in.”
“We lost some pretty good salespeople in that group,” Mouser said. “Your ex—”
“But most importantly,” Rayne cut him off, pinching the tip of the ring finger of her left hand between the thumb and forefinger of the right while brandishing it at him, “sales of in-game enhancements for our retro first-person shooter games are down by half from five years ago, and the launch of Magellanic Clouds Marines laid a big, fat, goose egg.”
“That bad?”
“They haven’t told anybody yet, but it sold less than a half-million copies, and that includes deep discounts on the presales. Our existing customer base is aging out and new gamers are all getting into that live-action stuff or playing alien titles. The only business that’s growing at all is creating apps for the smartphone market on Earth, and that only exists because the cellular network was designated a protected heritage technology.”
Mouser crushed his empty soda can and tossed it towards the plastic barrel for aluminum recycling where it joined the other near misses on the floor. “So how long do we have?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Rayne said, and her shoulders sagged. “The dome’s life-support equipment is all overdue for maintenance, but that’s nothing new, and we get our power and hot water from the geothermal wells. When is the next container ship expected?”
“Not for another five months. Did the exporters back on Earth get paid for the last batch?”
“Nobody is dumb enough to ship twenty million creds worth of groceries a few hundred light years without getting paid upfront. I thought you knew that was all handled through Thark escrow accounts.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Mouser said. “So I guess we need to call an emergency meeting of the Rules Committee.”
“Won’t do any good unless you have a solution to cram down their throats,” Rayne said. “Twelve people who don’t have a clue what to do next are no better than two. Besides, they’ll probably all resign as soon as we tell them.”
“Then why did you come to me?”
“Because I’ve spent every Tuesday night on this couch playing your Phoenician Trader beta for the last couple of years, and the decade before that was one unending dungeon crawl. You’re the best gamemaster on Bits.”
Mouser put both of his hands on top of his head with the fingers interlaced as if he was trying to prevent his skull from exploding. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
“It’s true,” Rayne insisted. “I can’t say two words to Shadow outside of this room without getting into a fight. Delphi pretends she doesn’t know me when she’s not in character, and don’t even get me started on Hercules. Our round ship would have sunk in the ancient Mediterranean three thousand years ago if you weren’t so good at managing players.”
“Phoenician Trader is still in development so I get to modify the rules when they don’t work. I can’t ask the exporters on Earth to ship food on credit or tell our alien landlord not to come around in another year looking for the next planetary lease payment. Whatever we do, everybody is going to have to agree on it.”
“Bits is an anarchy. The last thing everybody here agreed on was the tithe, and that was before I was born.”
“Technically, we agreed to the tithe before we left Earth,” Mouser corrected her. “The only thing we’ve even come close to agreeing on since then was offering our empty dome space to anybody with an interest in gaming. How much revenue is that bringing in?”
“Are you kidding?” Rayne asked in disbelief. “Have you seen any foreigners wandering around looking lost? The only takers have been a few thousand ex-Gem military who got tired of associating with our pirate friends and heard about the rentals from them. And they all made a deal with the landlord to restart the terraforming work rather than paying the head tax. Now, if I had a budget to advertise for immigrants in the Galactic Free Press…”
An obnoxious alarm bell began clanging over Mouser’s workbench and he spun on his stool to slap the silencer button. Then he grabbed an old-fashioned microphone that could have been ripped directly from an early twentieth-century radio studio, pressed the button on the base, and growled, “What?”
“Jewel of the New Gem Empire requesting clearance for landing,” a stilted voice that was obviously produced by translation technology announced from the speaker of an antique radio cabinet that was probably worth more than everything else in the workshop put together.
“You’re not expected and Bits is a safe zone for Old Empire Gem,” Mouser said. “Parking for unscheduled visitors is fifty—” he caught sight of Rayne leaning into his field of vision and desperately jabbing her finger towards the ceiling, “five hundred creds.”
“You want fifty-five hundred creds to land on this botched terraforming job of a planet?” the artificial voice asked in credulously.
“Just five hundred. I have a little stutter.”
“Jewel is an armed cruiser. I’ll take out your weapons systems before I’ll pay that—what?” There was a silence while somebody filled in the ship’s captain on Bit’s lack of defenses. “We’re landing and we’re not paying. Jewel out.”
“I tried,” Mouser told the disappointed treasurer. “We better go meet them at the airlock and find out what’s going on.”
“I’ll notify our Gem tenants.” Rayne tapped to life the screen of her wrist communicator, which was really a small smartphone held in place on her forearm by a wide Velcro strap. “Looks like they already know,” she said a minute later. “The main chat room for Cloner looks like comms traffic from a battlefield. And they’ve decided to make their stand in our museum.”
“That’s where all the heavy weapons they’ve sold us over the years are kept, but there’s zero chance we’re being invaded.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Rather than requesting permission for landing, the ship would have come down stealthed and troops would have broken through the airlocks before we knew they were here,” Mouser said. “And the revolution was more than twenty years ago. If the winning Gem had been motivated to go after their sisters they would have done it by now.”
“It did seem a bit odd that they’d come here when we only have a few thousand Gem in residence and almost never see them,” Rayne said, following Mouser into the corridor. The main airlock exiting on the old tarmac was just a dozen steps away. “But what could they—” she stopped short when the most handsome man she had ever seen in her life entered the dome without a hair out of place.
“Mouser. Rayne,” the new arrival greeted them as he stepped out of the airlock with an inhumanly perfect smile. “How’s the old party holding up? Still raiding dungeons together?”
“Dewey?” Mouser shook his head from side to side as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Is that you?”
“I decided that if I was going to spend the creds to pass as human, I may as well be good-looking,” the artificial person said. “I do miss my old shelving attachment, but I spend less than a quarter of my time in the library these days, and then I’m usually at the front desk rather than working the stacks.”
“What were you doing on a Gem warship?”
“Hitching a ride,” Dewey said. “They dropped me without stopping and now they’re off to go put the fear of the New Empire into a particularly thick-headed bunch of pirates. Somebody owes somebody a favor and they’ll be back to pick me up next week.”
“They’re gone,” Rayne confirmed after glancing down at the text flowing across her smartphone screen. “I can’t believe it’s you, Dewey. How long has it been?”
“Five years, more or less. You see how I’ve learned not to answer temporal questions down to the picosecond?”
“I’m impressed. Did you come back to Bits for a vacation? You said when you were leaving that if you never saw the place again it would be too soon.”
“I was a young artificial intelligence who learned that his existence was purely a matter of accident and that his creators were disappointed they couldn’t put him to work as a glorified database system to index all of the information on the planet,” Dewey said. “I’ll get right to the point and tell you I’m here on business as Flower’s emissary. Who’s the current chair of the Rules Committee?”
Mouser pointed at his own chest. “I got drafted. Let’s go back to my workshop and talk. We’re starting to draw a crowd.”
“Nothing to see here,” Rayne told the people who were leaning out of offices and workshops. “The Gem came, they saw, they vamoosed.”
“Who’s the hunk?” a teenage girl asked.
“Dewey is artificial intelligence and he’s younger than you are,” Mouser told the girl in a quiet aside before raising his voice. “Official Rules Committee business. Get out of our way or I’ll start delegating.”
The small crowd of curiosity seekers melted back into the doorways from which they had emerged.
“I see that the citizenry is as eager as ever to participate in their civic duties,” Dewey commented. “I’ve visited around half of the sovereign human communities in the galaxy since I joined Flower and Bits must be the worst governed of the bunch.”
“We aren’t governed, that’s the whole point of anarchy,” Rayne reminded him. “And I don’t know if I even want to talk with somebody who consorts with Traitors.”
“Traitors?” Dewey tilted his head as if he was having trouble processing her words and needed to slide a new memory into place. “Is that what you’re calling the twenty thousand Bitters who were smart enough to join Flower a couple of years after I did? I’ve worked with them on a number of projects and they’re having the time of their lives.”
“What a twenty-thousand-year-old Dollnick artificial intelligence is doing babysitting a bunch of human rejects is beyond me,” Mouser grumbled as he led the way into his workshop. “And I always thought that Flower was a silly name for an alien colony ship.”
“Flower could turn Bits into a ball of molten rock without straining her secondary pile. She chose the name because it’s non-threatening.”
The artificial person dusted some unidentifiable crumbs off the couch before taking his seat, and Rayne plopped down at the other end. Mouser grabbed a bag of potato chips from a large stainless steel cabinet labeled ‘Hazardous waste’ and settled into the overstuffed chair on the other side of the coffee table. The two humans exchanged a look and waited for their guest to speak first.
“You’re broke,” Dewey said.
“How did you know?” Rayne asked.
“And given that you must have left Flower days, if not weeks ago, how did you find out before I did?” Mouser added.
“Flower hosts a group of alien intelligence agents under an arrangement I’m not at liberty to detail, but the point is, we have our sources of information,” Dewey said. “Your planetary lease payment to the Hortens is overdue and there’s not enough money in the Bits treasury to pay. I’m here to offer you a way out.”
The treasurer began to open her mouth to contradict the artificial person but Mouser spoke right over her. “You’re right,” he said, shooting a warning look at Rayne. “We’re broke, and if we can’t come up with the payment in a hurry, the Hortens are likely to evict us. So what can you and your rogue Dollnick friend do about it?”
“Flower is not a rogue, and I can offer you two options,” Dewey said. “Our schedule is much tighter now that we’ve added four stops a year at Earth Two to ferry colonists and supervise the final stages of the terraforming, but Flower still has one open discretionary stop every other circuit. She’s willing to come here to take you all on board.”
“With the Traitors?” Rayne asked, her voice rising. “Never.”
“They are fully employed, making more money than they ever did here, and there’s enough work for the rest of you and a few million more. The games they play and the hacking they do in their free time is up to them. If you want to continue your ridiculous schism over archaic programming languages and platform technology on board Flower, you’ll be free to do so.”
“Easy, Rayne,” Mouser murmured to the treasurer before she could explode in indignation. He tossed her the bag of chips, perhaps to keep her hands busy so she wouldn’t go for the artificial person’s throat. “What’s the second option?”
“Remote work,” Dewey said. “Flower Entertainment has been experimenting with Live Action Role Playing. We have two studios on board and Flower aspires to hosting a tournament for the professional LARPing league. But our game developers—”
“Traitors,” Rayne interjected through a mouthful of potato chips.
“—are too busy with other projects to create a whole new role-playing franchise,” the artificial person continued, as if the interruption had never happened. “Flower has a rather unique take on the LARPing market. She wants to create a new segment that can be enjoyed by members of the tunnel network species of all ages and played across a full spectrum of platforms, from board games right up through the immersive virtual reality environment with hologram-wrapped bots providing the non-player characters.”
