Chapter One ~ Shadow Square Espionage

Drifting weightless in the dark, his right leg cored of its bone, Jurn tried to remember his resolve. Fighting his temptation to vent the previous year in a soundless scream, he cautioned himself, cajoled himself, and ended by begging. Just hold on a little longer, you stupid bugger. That's all I ask.

On the Shadow Squares, the Corps fancied that the punishment should fit the crime. They'd assured Jurn that he was lucky he wasn't floating in a decaying orbit, his suit out-gassing on the descent, his charred body falling over the Pacific. Jurn's crime had been monstrous. Their figures showed how many people would die on the surface from a lack of power because he'd sabotaged the kilometres-wide solar field Corps was building above the equator.

"You've delayed us by three months' work," Snave yelled into his earpiece. "Millions will be without electric power."

Jurn listened to the charge, drifting in and out of consciousness, until he shook himself to remember his plan. Beaten by their condemnation, he strove to remember that his actions had been deliberate, and that the shooting pain in his leg, and the uncomfortable bulk in his left hip, would make it all worthwhile.

When Jurn finally gave in to screaming, he was too far gone to see the look of satisfaction on Dr. Mejle's face. Jurn was deorbiting human society, burning in the atmosphere of his own life, and would, Mejle was assured, end up a crippled vegetable in a chair.

"Give him another twenty-four hours of that, and then ship him down."

~

Denni considered herself to be a conduit. For the people in Lubern, population two hundred in the summer, she was invisible. She'd not attended school after an abortive experiment when she turned six, and since that moment she'd been kept inside. The noise of the chaotic world wore on her, but from her parents' basement she was increasingly attracted to, and obsessed by moving information from one place to another.

If caught skulking to the refrigerator in the middle of the night, Denni would flood the air with information about particulate in the air, or endocrine blockers in the ground water. In person, her audience would reel backward, stunned, Denni believed, by the raw truth at her fingertips. Her friends online shared rather than feared her expertise, and she fed them carefully if they were new to the deluge, and poured her strange elixir down their throat if they were a regular follower.

Denni was a guru of the information age, an old-style telephone operator listening to every call, as well as the massive switchboard itself. Her fingers calloused like a guitar player, she was on newsgroups and chats, social platforms and obscure blogs, ferreting out information, evaluating it, and if she found it worthy, watering it with other facts until it grew like a weed rooted in the soil of the darkest part of the web. Her identity hidden behind a dozen constructs, as well as the best security her parents' middleclass salaries could buy after an upsetting NSA visit, Denni sat like a spider in the middle of a vast web. Rather than trapping she was releasing, and rather than waiting for a tremble in the silk, she went searching.

The chaos of the world was beyond her scope, but the merely human construction of the internet was ripe for her changes. Although some might say that she took on more than any could chew, she ground up information into component parts and spit it back into the void, where it would either ripen into fruit or wither on the vine.

~

They heard later that they were the last coffin ship to leave Earth. Resources were tighter than they realized, although with the many millions starving around the world, Earth's wish to conserve even her trash should not have come as a surprise. Earth's last coffin ship was more than a decommissioned and rickety freighter hauling migrants and criminals out to space, however. Working together in the tenth year of the resource wars, those who organized their own escape had pooled their meagre accounts, stolen materials, and bribed and tricked government officials. Like eleven billion others, they were running to a dream and away from a nightmare.

There were many who spoke against shipping out, and some of their arguments were compelling. Reverend Dander, for instance, claimed that life on Earth, however brutish, could not equal what happened to people who were desperate enough to join the UN on their one way ride. "These are one way coffin tickets to a hell of cold, rather than a hell of fire. We have no guarantee that any of the crews have survived. Don't leave Earth now. Not when she is at her most needy."

Nera had watched him on television, after four hundred channels were limited to three just like when she was a kid. Nera was still watching twenty years later, the night Dander's church was bombed. The camera cut to a long shot of the fireball, his church tinier than it had ever seemed from the inside, at least behind the flames. Even at the time Nera remembered wondering how the copter cam could have been there, the news stations so ready to capitalize on the slaughter. She didn't like Dander's preaching, and she was dead set against his views, but obviously she wasn't the most aggressive of his detractors.

"You heard?" Jennie had a way of calling almost before an event transpired.

"About Dander? I was just watching it. Poor bastard."

"Poor bastard nothing. He's our ticket. With the planet leavers so fired up they will bomb a church, people will finally pony up with the cash. More money than ever will come rolling in."

"I knew I could count on you for sympathy," Nera had said to Jennie at the time, but she was also aware that Jennie was just being realistic. She could find a dollar bill in a windstorm if their project needed it, and it did.

"My sympathy is for those who are off planet. Which are few enough." Characteristically, Jennie hung up, leaving Nera sitting stupidly, familiarly, with the receiver in her hand.

She was right, of course. After Dander and fourteen hundred parishioners burned alive, every tin can that could be cobbled together into a ship would be packed to the gills with desperate hopefuls.

~

Tason never considered himself to be a latter day Thomas Edison. From what he knew of the man, Edison was more hasty media chattel than inventor, while Tason himself, trapped between his avatars from playing D&D and his extensive science fiction collection, had followed other footsteps. For his parents, however, cramped by their middle class values, Tason's extensive mining of fiction for his knowledge of the world was unproductive and childishly arresting.

"You're caught up in some zero sum notion of how it can be," Tason had told them rather plaintively, but to no effect.

"Until you're ready to make an income-a twenty-three year old man living in our basement-you'll have to find another place to live."

"Look. If it's about sleeping in, I can get up earlier." Tason made the ultimate concession.

"I'm sorry, son." His father didn't look sorry at all. "You're just going to have to learn the meaning of work."

"We can give you a few more months to get a job." His mother always scaled back his father's ultimatums, which was part of the reason Tason still lived at home.

"No, we can't. We've given you more than enough time." To underscore his seriousness, his father stepped sideways and tore down Tason's prized X-files poster, his milk-white hands surprising deft.

"What the fuck?"

"Watch your language." Unrepentant, his father crumpled the paper and threw it into the corner of the room. "Pack your things." He stamped out of the room, leaving Tason's mother behind.

"Oh, dear. Oh, dear."

Tason finally pushed her out and closed the door while he tried to speed up his thought processes. He wished, not for the first time, that he had the cortical implants he'd heard were coming.

"Fuck's sake," he mumbled to himself, and began rooting in his closet for a pack even as he called Len, his gamer friend.

"Hey, Len. You've got your own place." It wasn't really a question. "Can I crash there for a couple of days? Yea, some problems with the folks. Naw, temporary. Couple of days. Yea, thanks Wiz."

Once he'd lined up a couch, Tason, his mind working fairly well even without the implants, packed some clothes, his console, and some hacked boards. He left his laptop plugged into the cable until the last minute, in case something blew across his screen that could change his whole situation. Finally, bribing his way out of Roids, and closing the dozens of windows on desperate social networking sites and conspiracy pages, Tason tucked his laptop into his bag.

His parents were just sitting down to dinner when Tason went through the upstairs, and he stood at the table awkwardly. "Hey, if you guys wouldn't mind just keeping the stuff in my room so I can come get it when I have a place, that would be cool."

"Of course, son." His mother looked reproachfully at his father.

"You'll be better for it, boy." His dad said finally, although what Tason would be better for he was reluctant to say.

"Okay, see ya." Tason turned away, and just barely managed to avoid his mother's question about where he was going before the door pinched shut on her concern.