“Do we have to?” I asked uselessly. A little taste of that Aberlour would be nice.
“Some kind of action is required,” Hotstuff observed. “Even inaction is an action. Perhaps the only kind of action you seem to enjoy lately.” She raised her eyebrows in disdain while she scanned the European financial reports.
“Summon the Council.” I sighed, scratching my stubble.
Portals to my homeworld opened up off the deck, and I walked into our main conference room, shifting my attire into a navy sport coat with a stiff-collared white shirt. Hotstuff strode in behind me, her tidy chignon and crisp suit radiating efficiency and purpose.
One by one, my councilors materialized around the long cherry-wood conference table that glistened under the bioluminescent ceiling. About half of them appeared dull-eyed, having just woken to patch in from whatever time zone they were in for this surprise meeting. The other half weren’t human, but our trusted synthetics, and they appeared bright and cheerful, their smiles following me around the room toward the head of the table.
Then again, perhaps I had them mixed up. Maybe the dull-eyed ones were my synthetics. I had a hard time telling the difference anymore.
These weren’t just your run-of-the-mill women and sims, but, like Hotstuff, more like a twelve-year-old boy’s fantasy. They posed casually around the room as if a fashion shoot could be announced at any instant, with the long conference table springing into action as a catwalk.
My calling a sudden meeting like this was unusual, to say the least, and they watched me cautiously. Information packets were dispersed, appearing on the table in front of them as I sat down.
“No need for pleasantries.” This wasn’t a social call. “Look at your instructions. We’re going to be liquidating everything.”
A pause while they assimilated the data downloads.
“Questions?”
“No questions regarding the details, sir,” chimed one of them, Alessandria. “But it may help to understand your motivation. Some of the assets you are seeking to liquidate, are, um, well, they’re not what you want people to know you’re in a hurry to sell.”
My motivation, now that was a good question.
There were only two things I really knew. First, that I had no idea what I was trying to escape from, just that, whatever it was, it was trying to kill me. And second, just sharing the idea that something was trying to hunt me down made my situation even more dangerous. To minimize risk, I had to pretend nothing was happening.
“No reason,” I replied as casually as I could. “Just the whim of a bored trillionaire. I don’t want to raise suspicion, so keep this on the down-low, right?”
Perhaps that was the wrong choice of words.
“On the down-low?” Roxanne, my resource manager for the Asia Pacific region raised her eyebrows. “You want me to just dump all the yachts, the islands, the racetracks…?”
“Yes.”
At this I felt a twinge of remorse. The baubles of Indigo Entertainment, my latest and ill-fated attempt at a new foray into the business world, still held some sparkle in my eye.
While I could lay claim to being super-wealthy, I had to admit I couldn’t say the same about being super-intelligent. My success in the business world was more about luck, and luck was hard to replicate. My original luck, the good fortune that had made me my fortune, had been helped along by my friend and long-time mentor, Patricia Killiam, and a team of incredibly smart people. It had also been born from a single-minded obsession with the future, or perhaps, just one future in particular.
“Don’t go out and just dump it,” explained Hotstuff. “Don’t attract attention. Be subtle. Go out there and do what we pay you for. Anyway, most of the Indigo Entertainment stuff is a waste of time.” Hotstuff looked toward me. “I don’t think we’ll need to explain ourselves very much.”
Roxanne considered this, shifting around in her chair. “I may have someone who could be interested.”
The paranoia set in. Perhaps these assets were what whoever was messing with me wanted. Is Roxanne in on the fix? I looked carefully at her. Hotstuff sensed what I was thinking and headed me off before I could say anything.
“Very good,” Hotstuff replied to Roxanne. “If there are no more questions, please everyone, get to work.”
Nobody objected, and, one by one, just as they’d appeared, my councilors faded from the conference room.
When they’d all gone, Hotstuff looked at me sympathetically. “You’re going to need to trust your team,” she said slowly. After a pause she added, “And you’re going to need to trust me.”
Visions of Kurt Gödel, the famous Austrian mathematician, sprang to mind. Suffering from deep paranoia, he’d only accepted food prepared by his wife to eat. When she fell ill one day and was sent to hospital, he refused to eat food given to him by anyone else. He died of starvation just shortly before his wife had returned.
“I just hope nothing happens to you,” I replied. “I’m not sure I could starve myself.”
While proxxi had full access to our memories and sensory systems and could usually guess what we were thinking, they couldn’t read our minds. Not yet, anyway.
Hotstuff gave me a funny look.
I shrugged. It wasn’t worth explaining.
4
I was up at sunrise the next day as well, my sleep again filled with nightmares, but nightmares that were spilling from dreamland into reality. The darkness was smearing into light, unconsciousness into consciousness, dream life into waking life, all becoming barely distinguishable from each other. Hotstuff was waiting patiently in our war room while I dragged myself into the bathroom for a shower to wake up.
I stared into the depths of my bloodshot eyes in the mirror. Condensation from the hot shower fogged my image while I inspected the angry blood vessels ringing my irises.
“Can we take a short surf break again this morning?” I asked Hotstuff, reaching into a drawer below the sink to get my eye drops.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she replied, shouting over the noise of the shower. “We have a lot to do. It’s getting more dangerous.”
I sighed, unscrewing the bottle cap and holding it between my teeth. Leaning back, I pulled back the lid of my left eye and deposited a drop into it. Rubbing that eye, I switched to the other.
“Come on,” I grunted from between clenched teeth, holding the bottle cap in place as I lined up the dropper above my right eye. “A half an hour out on the.… ”
I gagged. The bottle cap had popped like a cork from between my teeth to lodge itself into my windpipe. My body convulsed as I tried to pull air into my lungs. Hotstuff was immediately beside me and already alerting the emergency services. Panic exploded in my veins. I clawed at the bathroom walls, doubling over onto the floor, my chest heaving.…
“See what I mean?”
I was standing back at the sink, staring into my bloodshot eyes, but Hotstuff was there with me, holding out her hand to take the bottle cap.
That was close.
I’d barely escaped that event, less than five seconds away in the future on an alternate timeline. I handed Hotstuff the cap and then, after a split second of contemplation, handed over the whole bottle. My eyes weren’t that bloodshot.
“I guess surfing can wait.”
Whatever it was that was hunting me down, it had infected the very personal and immediate realities surrounding me.
“Forget the shower,” I added. “Let’s just get to work.”