The Harmony Paradox Read online

  Crystalline wind chime sound filled her apartment. Nina glanced to her right at the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over West City; a jagged skyline of black absorbed the deep reds and oranges of dusk. Wow… he’s actually on time.

  Nina patched in to the house computer, linking to the panel out in the hallway by the door. A virtual window popped up showing the corridor, and a weary-looking Joey in his cowboy hat and black trench coat. He’d let his black hair get frizzy and long, too many late nights in NetOps. She opened the lock and sent her voice out via the speaker. “Hey. I’m in the kitchen. Decided to cook tonight.”

  “Okay, that works…”

  Nina took the pan off the heat and eased the three pieces of chicken onto individual plates. She’d about finished doling out pasta and pouring more of the sauce over it when Joey walked into the kitchen, eyebrow raised, thumb cocked back over his shoulder.

  “What’s up with the critter on the couch?” He sidled up behind her and threaded his arms around her.

  Nina smiled at the food. “Her name is Elizaveta.”

  “Privet,” said a tiny voice from the doorway behind Joey. “Eto Vash muzh?”

  “Bad case. I picked her up this afternoon. I’ll be fostering her… maybe more than that if things work out. She doesn’t speak any English yet.” She set the pan on a cool burner and turned around to kiss Joey. After, she smiled at the clean, straight-haired girl in a neat white dress and purple-painted toenails, switching to Russian. “I have not married him… yet. Maybe I will.” Nina winked.

  The girl flashed a conspiratorial grin as she padded into the kitchen.

  He took off his hat and coat, giving the child a narrow-eyed stare like a gunfighter about to draw on his nemesis. Long hair and a couple days without shaving left him looking more like a pirate captain than a cowboy. “Is it housebroken?”

  Elizaveta climbed into her seat, wide eyed at the food. After a second of staring at her plate, she looked up at Nina. “Eto vse dlya menya?”

  “Yes it’s all yours. Don’t hurt yourself, but as much as you can finish,” said Nina in Russian before smirking at Joey as she joined them at the table. “I know you’re trying to be cute, but… can you skip the animal comparisons for now? You heard about Osiris?”

  He cringed and slithered into a chair. “Crap. She’s one of those kids? Wow, I’m fried. I saw those files… Spent the past week balls-deep in Osiris’s neuroprocessor cluster array. Didn’t recognize her cleaned up.” He watched her eat for a moment before a look of recognition appeared on his face. “Oh yeah, the aggressive little bugger who kept kicking the door.” Joey shoveled a forkful of chicken and pasta into his mouth, chewing with exaggerated mmm sounds. “Oh, damn. This is great.”

  “First time trying this… Just simple instructions.” She nibbled on hers. “Damn corporations… kidnapping across the ocean. What’s next?”

  Elizaveta shoveled forkful after forkful in her mouth.

  “Their whole system is more akin to the capitalist runaway that occurred in the years leading up to the war. Most of their population is shit poor, but the corporations over there are still concerned about bad PR. Odd to say it, but they’d be less likely to do something this scummy.” He sighed, staring down. “They’d sooner just kill them and blame the resistance, or I guess they were too small to be thought of as a threat. Probably would’ve sent them to Mars to bolster a colony.”

  ACC Mars… Nina cringed. They were safer in the cages. It’s a damn mess up there.

  He chuckled under his breath. “So you wanted to keep one? No consult?”

  Elizaveta whined, staring at about half a plate of food she seemed too full to eat―but really wanted to.

  “I saw how you were with Hayley… I thought you’d be okay with―”

  “We’ll see.” He leaned to the side and raised an eyebrow at the girl. When she looked at him, he switched eyebrows. She smiled. “Maybe we can work with this one.”

  “I have clingy parents. They’d adore watching her whenever we wanted ‘us time.’” Nina sat straighter.

  Joey forced a smile. “You sure you want to expose her to the creepy twins?”

  Nina chuckled. “They’re not creepy, and I can’t believe Dad. He’s warming up to them, even knowing…”

  “Yeah.” He winced.

  Nina smiled. “I think she adopted me at first sight. Only one of the lot who wasn’t afraid of me.”

  “Well you are pretty scary when you’re mad, or got your mind set on something, or find a giant, knuckle-dragging bastard…”

  “Oh.” Nina set the fork down on her plate. “You watched my logs, didn’t you?”

  “Twice. With popcorn.” He winked. “Extra butter. About that whole revenge thing… Do you feel better?”

  She spent a few seconds watching the child attempt to eat just one more forkful while swaying her feet back and forth. Elizaveta still had a hint of wariness, as though someone might come up behind her and take the food away, but seemed… grateful.

  Nina let her mind dwell on the memory of tearing Bertrand Foster’s telescoping eyes out of his skull.

  “Yeah.” She exhaled past a smile. “I do. I think I can finally let myself live.”

  neasy silence pervaded the apartment, save for the occasional pat of a droplet falling in the autoshower tube. Wrapped from armpit to thigh in a plain black towel, Katya leaned on the bathroom sink and stared into the chocolate-brown eyes of a woman she didn’t even know anymore. Her reflection seemed to be giving her the ‘what the hell are you doing?’ face. Of all the random turns her life might’ve taken, choosing a random exit off the ‘could die at any minute’ express into something that might almost resemble a normal life hadn’t even been at the bottom of her list. It hadn’t made it into her thought process at all. She’d expected to die in her sleep or at the end of a desperate―and ultimately futile―effort to flee her former ‘employers.’

  What’s wrong with me? A kid. Really?

  She sighed.

  The cruelest thing Katya imagined anyone could do to a child in this day and age would be to conceive them in the first place. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d had sex because of an assignment requiring it. Counting the number of times she’d made love to someone she had feelings for proved easier―zero. Not that it much mattered. Her former owners had given her a cybernetic contraceptive. A similar implant existed here in the UCF, but the owner could turn it on and off via mental command. Hers had no such feature, the switch likely still controlled by someone at Vertex Investments. She scoffed at the thought. Vertex existed on paper as a financial firm, but in reality provided a cover for the Office of Operational Intelligence. It made no sense that they should keep the ‘cover company,’ as the UCF already knew Vertex for what it was. If the ‘company’ didn’t ruin lives on a daily basis, the whole thing would seem like some kind of bizarre game. Both sides know what’s going on, but they played along anyway.

  Company assets seldom received permission to have kids. Attachments created weakness, not to mention childbirth would’ve sidelined a useful operator for months. She could’ve played the game, sucked up to the right person, asked nicely. Maybe a Director would’ve let her have a baby as a reward for some assignment performed above and beyond. Most women in her position who wanted out attached themselves to men with power or influence, even if they were twenty or thirty years their senior, and became wives.

  Katya had never bothered asking. She’d never even thought about it.

  I don’t want children. I didn’t then either. I still don’t. Eve’s not a child; she only looks like one.

  She let her head hang and exhaled.

  So why do I feel like I don’t want her and can’t let her go at the same time?

  Katya pushed off the sink, standing straight, and unwrapped the towel. After draping it over a silver bar mounted to the wall, she stepped once again in the autoshower tube to let another dry cycle finish off her damp hair. The plastic door closed with a th
unk that echoed loud in the cylindrical chamber. An eight-by-eight inch holo-panel scrolled open in front of her, three-fourths of it covered with cycle and temperature selections, and a tiny NewsNet window in the upper right corner.

  The reporter, Kimberly Brightman, rattled on about some mess at an abandoned nuclear power plant, where some kind of ‘psionic terrorist’ group had been amassing themselves. It seemed no one knew what they wanted, how many of them there’d been, or even where they’d gone off to. As usual, the news played to the paranoia.

  With a few finger taps at the holographic control panel, Katya skipped straight to the dry cycle. Warm air swam in a cyclone around her. Head back, she closed her eyes and tried to enjoy the feeling of not needing to worry about assassins.

  Less likely than her contemplating finding a regular job and living in an apartment with a legal daughter had been Joey’s getting in the door of Division 9. Not only the National Police Force, but their intelligence group. Scary people with scary reach and even more frightening abilities to influence society. For all the rumored talk of the Citizen Management Office being a bunch of fascists, they had nothing on Division 9. The CMOs still cared more about their paycheck and promotions than any sense of national identity or loyalty to a unified government as a concept. No, Division 9 worried her far more. Some of them would do stupid things, like risk their life for the ‘greater good,’ or some sense of misguided patriotism. A wistful smile teased at her lips. Despite finding the notion romantic in an archaic sort of way, she thought them fools for buying into it.

  Somehow, the anti-establishment thrill-seeker had found his ass in a government chair. The irony of it almost made her laugh out loud in the tube. She still couldn’t claim to like him, straight-laced or neo-punk. He took too many risks, acted without thinking, didn’t respect anything, and either pretended to be or was an unrepentant chauvinist. An association with him would only bring disaster, but something about him kept her from scrubbing him out of her sphere of awareness.

  That mess with the AI invading a military production facility had gotten attention. Even Katya’s tangential role in the whole thing brought with it an unwelcome amount of scrutiny. Division 9 knew who she was now, though perhaps it had been a small price to pay for peace of mind.

  His new connections had proved invaluable. Because of him, Katya Wolf existed as a citizen of the UCF, with no need to worry about anyone from back home coming after her. He’d also set the girl, EAO-106, up with a proper citizen record after she chose the name Eve. No one needed to know her past. With that cruel anti-aging mechanism removed, she had nothing Starpoint Corporation could want, merely an ordinary little girl with special forces training.

  The whirring fans died down. Katya pushed the autoshower hatch open and stepped into a bathroom that felt like it had dropped twenty degrees while she’d been in the tube. She slipped into a cream-colored t-shirt and sweat pants before heading out and down the hallway to the living room.

  Her apartment, at least according to the building management, sat dead center of ‘middle class.’ Two bedrooms, a full kitchen, decent sized living room with a dining area, and even a retractable patio/deck―if one could stomach being on a slab of plastisteel sixty-one stories off the ground.

  Dark orange threaded among the rectangular forms of century towers across the street. Light from a stream of hovercars eleven stories down shimmered on facing glass, making the distant twilight sky seem darker. Carpet squished underfoot, like walking on a sponge that massaged her soles. She passed the end of the couch and folded her arms, gazing out the window. Small flying bots zipped among the city in view, some delivering merchandise to apartment windows, others chasing down any pedestrian they could find and displaying ads based on some algorithm to calculate needs. Here and there, luminous ‘daisies’ bloomed and vanished in the dark, wherever petals of holo-panels full of products exploded into being around orb bots.

  Welcome to the UCF.

  She glanced away from the strip of window that covered the entire interior wall of the living room, and shot a wary look past the kitchen to the door. Her apartment had one way in or out, not counting the fire escape tube. They’d been here about eight months, and she still had trouble falling asleep in the Comforgel bed. It had taken her almost seven weeks to stop sleeping in a chair facing the door with a gun in her lap.

  Katya rubbed her face and grumbled. How long is it going to take me to believe they’re not coming?

  She flopped on the long black sectional. At her side upon a small black lacquer table, small orbs of white light appeared within a silver lattice frame, an artistic lamp attempting to mimic faeries sitting on the branches of a tree.

  “Terminal.”

  A thirty-inch holo-panel scrolled open in midair nearby. A pinpoint of light near the ceiling gave away its origin, a hidden projector. Katya swiped her hand at the display, paging over screen after screen in her message client, finding nothing new. She couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the NewsNet window, but had shrunk it to a six-inch square, as small as the software would let it go.

  Two swipes of her hand pulled up her credit account, which displayed a balance of Ͼ699,421. Seeing the first digit no longer a seven annoyed and worried her in equal measure. The apartment drained her for Ͼ4700 a month, plus whatever power and water she used. A few trickling residual deposits showed from Alex for past jobs, the most significant deposit hit almost nine months ago, the 250 grand from Siege Arms Corporation. Every time she looked at it, she had to laugh. More of Joey’s weird sense of humor. To think that the company she’d stolen a truck full of weapons from had paid her a reward for finding and returning them.

  Katya moaned into her hand at the thought of Anatoly Nemsky, the general. The man she’d met in that lounge hadn’t been real. Could an AI have followed through on its promise of making Vertex Investments forget she existed? Joey might’ve had a surprising amount of influence in the GlobeNet, but no deck jockey could influence minds the way a genocidal military commander with friends in all the right places could.

  She shifted her gaze to the contacts section and twirled her finger around Alex’s entry. Even as a still image, the mid-twenties blond man in the fancy, shimmery blue suit exuded superiority, but beneath his genteel veneer lurked danger. He represented everything her inexplicable choice needed to stay away from. She couldn’t risk herself anymore. It didn’t matter as much if a job went south when the brightest future she could hope for was not seeing the assassin coming and dying a painless death. Now she had a child to watch out for. Or at least a small person who needed a little help getting by until her body caught up to her age.

  A few more gestures at the intangible screen opened a GlobeNet browser, and she pulled up a search for job ads. The money she’d made spying, stealing, and planting listening devices wouldn’t last forever, and she expected Siege Arms might eventually figure things out and quietly take back their reward. Maybe they wouldn’t, but she didn’t want to let the account dip below 250 grand at least until a few years had passed.

  Page after page of boredom scrolled by. She flicked her finger every few seconds, read the title of a post, and moved on. Almost all of the listings involved business, law, or professional training she lacked. Ten-ish years infiltrating companies could let her fake her way through a conversation, perhaps even an interview, but she didn’t trust herself to be able to do any of the jobs on the screen.

  Human resources, data analytics, programming, medical technician… she stopped on an office manager position and read a few lines: manage conference room allocations, supplies, coordinate meetings, field complaints. Maybe I could do―requires four-year degree or equivalent experience. Masters in managerial studies preferred.

  “Chort.”

  She dismissed the terminal with a wave of her arm and reclined on the couch, staring at the dark grey drop ceiling. Memories of disarming explosives, evading sensor grids, climbing narrow places, disabling security systems, and seducing her way into the
bed of a man she needed to kill cycled around and around in her mind. Hmm. Security. She pondered applying for a job with corporate security. That she could probably fake competently enough to hold on to the position until she learned the rest. She sat up and drew a breath to say ‘terminal’ again, but froze at the continued silence.

  Anyone looking at the dark blue rug, neat table and chair set in the adjacent dining room, or numerous small decorative (breakable) objects everywhere would never believe an eight-year-old lived here, even one with an abnormally high level of maturity. Katya twisted the material of her shirt around in her fingers, trying to come up with a good answer as to why she’d gone back to collect the girl rather than let her go into the system like an orphan. Perhaps the similarity in their lives had forged a connection. Katya still had no desire to take care of children, but Eve didn’t exactly need the same level of parental monitoring.

  After all, the eight-year-old had been alive for twenty years.

  She looked up, left, and right. Even a not-child at that age should be making some noise.

  “Eve?” After a few breaths of silence, Katya called again in a louder voice. “Eve?”

  Something’s wrong.

  Katya got up and jogged into the apartment’s only hallway where a dinner-plate sized silver disc bot glided back and forth across the carpet, barely making a sound. She stepped over it and walked past the bathroom, stopping at the point where two bedroom doors faced each other. The tiny closet at the end of the hallway sat open, with a few stacks of folded linens spilled out onto the rug. She brushed her fingers through the air at the sensor on the wall, and the door slid to the left, vanishing into the wall.

  “Eve?” Katya peered in.

  A small figure lay curled up on the floor between a desk and the Comforgel pad, wearing a cream-colored dress and a thick coating of sweat. Her snow-white hair had grown to shoulder-length since they’d found her, and fanned out in a messy spray upon the carpet. Her senshelmet lay nearby as though it had fallen off her after she collapsed; the Yume-Koujou system displayed a ‘game join’ screen for Colony Commando 8 – Scarlet Faction with an overlay in red text: You have been timed out due to inactivity.