Snapshot

Usually, it’s easy to hate the customers. Usually, the risk in these dangerous situations is much more on Thom’s side. Usually, his job involves doing something seemingly crazy, like trying to seal a puncture in a hull from outside a decompressing spacecraft as debris spews out of the opening at bullet-like velocities and the venting atmosphere blows away the PHOME before it can set. This is–again, usually–accompanied by an equivalent volume of verbal shrapnel coming through his helmet speaker from the impatient customer, who is safely in lockdown elsewhere on their ship.

Usually, it’s easy to hate the customers.

It’s somewhat more difficult, though, when you accidentally kill them. It becomes even more difficult when the customer in question seems reasonable, unassuming, and just rightfully concerned that the firmware update in their vascometrics package is somehow causing the billions of infinitesimal sensors in their blood to resonate and circulate painfully in time with one of the rhythmic but normally-imperceptible phase shifts of their ship’s FTL relays.

It’s more difficult still when Thom is forced to discover, on reaching the relay chamber where the customer is now incapacited, that REZQ have not paid for the full license for his “universal” vascometrics factory reset tool, and thus it is not compatible with the data format of the customer’s vascometrics sensors.

It becomes nigh-on impossible to maintain that skein of disdain for the demanding customer as the resonance feeds back and feeds back, the customer’s eyes start to bleed, and their shouting becomes incoherent–while Thom is frantically trying to purchase an ad-hoc temporary license with his phone, but cannot get a connection to the licensing server. And when, as the customer’s head bursts like an egg in a microwave, showering warm gore over everything in a thirty-seven metre radius, Thom is still watching the little circle spin round and round on his now-blood-spattered phone screen, until the payment finally goes through.

Not so easy to hate the customer in that situation.

~

If there’s one positive to take from this, it’s that, while this won’t look good on his record, and will probably attract a financial penalty, it probably won’t endanger Thom’s job much more than any other “minor” infraction. The customer–or rather, the deceased–was only a Basic Plan subscriber, with no meaningful service-level element to their agreement with REZQ. REZQ could, in fact, have some salvage stake on their vessel to cover outstanding subscription fees. And, because of occurrences like this, the basic REZQ subscriber agreement waives any right (as such “rights” still exist) for next-of-kin to bring legal action against the company for indirectly causing death by negligence. Indeed, the opportunity not to waive this is a feature of the higher-cost, higher-level subscriptions–the calculation by REZQ’s AI-driven pricing engine being that, if REZQ employees perform to an adequate baseline, the revenue from the higher price will usually offset any necessary negligence payouts.

Knowing that the company won’t feel more than the loss of a low-paying subscriber probably won’t do much to salve the dull, guilty ache that Thom feels: both for being unable to save the customer in time, and for experiencing a surge of blind anger when he realised that he had paid for a temporary vascometrics data format license he could now not use.

An early REZQ promotional artefact–an advertising flyer, personalised per-employee and couriered aboard each respective REZQ vessel shortly after commissioning. Thom does not remember ever posing for this weird-looking picture, but he’d been fullbody-scanned so many times even in the first few days of his time with REZQ that it would be trivial for them to generate something like this for promotional purposes. Makes him worried about where else his image might be being used–REZQ would definitely have sold his 3D scan data to model libraries for a few extra bucks, there are a lot of weirdos out there, and they seem to be able to spend money on correspondingly weird shit. Well, he guesses he’d never know about it anyway.

There’s a stack of these somewhere on Angel Fish. Probably in one of the toilet blocks — they printed these things on real paper.

History is marbled with the blood of those who have been wrongly killed by heavily-armed AIs.

Farthest from significant oversight, and often maintained by those who don’t have the first clue what they’re doing, High Consequence Intruder Deterrence systems found on many spacecraft are among those armed AIs with the highest accidental bodycount.

It’s all down to false positives: the variety of identities ascribed to individuals based on their relative position and value in numerous corporate hierarchies means that setting up a “whitelist” of those who the security system should ignore is a non-trivial problem. In other words, while you might want to tell the AI “this person is a friend, don’t hurt them”, the markers of that person’s identity might shift for countless reasons beyond the comprehension or capacity of the AI. Their parent company might change hands (this tends to happen on an almost continual basis), and apply a new set of identification standards that require them to deactivate their old vascometrics package and add a new one, incompatible with the ship’s security system. A shift in role might mean they have to have their DNA altered in such a way that they become biologically unrecognisable to the AI.

The general solution to this is to set looser identification parameters. Facial recognition; certain other biometric elements such as voice, and so on. The parameters by which such a system sorts friends from threats are fixed when the system is set up. The trouble is, while those parameters stay the same, life drifts and creeps. Situations change, purposes change, personnel change. As it’s expected that most systems will be set-up-and-forget, as the expertise needed to keep a system like this tuned effectively is of extremely high cost, most AIs of this nature have some degree of iterative self-update to their identification algorithms mapped onto chaos-based calculations. With this as a basis, security AIs often try to anticipate social and functional shifts without user intervention, and adjust their identification parameters accordingly. Unfortunately this feature tends to develop and bloom into a logic that no organic lifeform working within the symbolic order could hope to understand, leaving an AI security system whose behaviour is eccentric at best, and fatally unpredictable at worst.

So it’s  pretty common for these systems to finally reach a point where their unpredictability makes them a hazard to a ship’s crew. And, as is often the case with problems like this, they’re left til the last possible moment to solve–and when the last possible moment comes, they’re handed off to someone else.

A REZQ subscription makes the decision of who to hand this problem a far easier one to make.

One of the biggest issues that capitalism has come up against is that, no matter how hard you push them, people will eventually have to sleep. Somno’s Dreamcluster technology was devised as a way of solving that problem. Not the problem of sleep–several companies have mastered keeping people alive without sleep for weeks and months, but all have witnessed the same catastrophic side-effects (ranging from dementia to psychosis)–but the problem of how economically unproductive people are when they’re asleep.

What if you could make money while you sleep? That is the promise of Somno: through the Dreamcluster network, Somno can harness the ventral stream recognition abilities of organic entities to digitise complex metadata from source material at a fraction of the cost of a conventional AI system. Users get paid in Somno currency for the hiring out of their sleeping minds, and Somno sell the data to the highest bidder. While each individual’s processing capacity is relatively small, the low barrier to entry and large number of desperate subscribers have already made Somno an attractively low-priced source of metadata for companies wanting to catalogue, categorise, or describe complex things.

Doing this takes a little bit of intervention into the body, of course. A laboratory-modified endoparasitoid fungus, taken as spores from a single-use inhaler, blooms mycelia into the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus of the hypothalamus and provides the necessary scaffolding onto which an intravenously-administered nanoscale iterative generational construction swarm can build duplex RF carrier/DAC circuits and pathways into the brain. With this interface, it is trivial–or so Somno claim–to establish a connection between the user’s smartphone and the diffuse sleep centres of the brain. The Somno app can then intervene in the sleep process itself, and, ultimately, turn sleep into a way of processing packets of digital data–dumped into the brain in one sleep cycle, processed in the next, and extracted in the next. Dreamnet by Somno: you can do it in your sleep.

Somno users experience vivid, powerful dreams, as their wetware is put to work parsing and returning descriptions of sensory input recordings–sounds, smells, images, tastes, sensations. Sleep is, of course, of extraordinarily poor quality if a Somno session is scheduled–it’s as exhausting as any number of other tasks undertaken during a period of wakefulness. It’s not been established yet what level of damage this does to the brain or to the mental health of the user. Somno, of course, insist that it’s harmless.

Moreover, there are rumours that Dreamnet is a huge scam, and that the hallucinatory experiences of users are a flashy sideshow based on simple neural input tricks, designed to encourage faith in the company’s mastery of the still poorly-understood processes of sleep. Up close, Dreamnet-processed data looks suspiciously like huge chunks of it have been randomly generated based on superficial automated parsing of data, with much of the real number-crunching seeming like it might be undertaken by wakeful organic beings in data sweatshops after the “processed” data has come back from the sleeping users’ brains. But the Somno myth is powerful and seductive–especially to investors whose money bankrolls the company’s and the network’s growth, while its founders no doubt search with increasing desperation for a way to make the technology profitable.

Whether or not it’s real, and whether or not it’s dangerous, there is a truly blissful moment in the process, where the Somno app provides a few minutes of a kind of vestibular experience between wakefulness and the deep sleep needed to execute the program. Hijacking the conscious mind in its most fragmentary and vulnerable moments, it clears away the intrusive thoughts that might otherwise interfere with a traumatised person’s sleep. Much more than the pitiful stipend for the work, this is the part of being a Somno user that keeps Thom accepting new data packages.

When REZQ was incorporated by the algorithm administering the head company of its corporate group, it immediately, aggressively, acquired and dissolved the courier company DLIVRI–mainly for easy access to a Salient-compliant, FTL-enabled fleet of cargo ships (ripe for conversion to REZQ recovery vessels); vacuum cutters; space-able staff; and, most importantly, a huge list of customers. And, along with those things, they also inherited the courier company’s manifest of undelivered parcels. In order to salve shareholder worries about potential liabilities for those items held in limbo–even though insurance would likely take care of it, and anyone who couldn’t afford insurance could basically go to hell anyway–the takeover included a tweak to REZQ’s branding that styled them partly as a courier company.

“REZQ Recovery and Courier Logistics”, though, don’t really do much with their parcels. When DLIVRI was acquired, the highly idiosyncratic package manifest system the courier company had developed was unable to export the data that matched packages to customers. So, in practice, this means that REZQ ships tend to have a lot of unclaimed parcels and packages lying around which technically still belong to somebody. And as nobody ever did the work of either a) establishing a process for matching those parcels to their destinations, b) actually delivering them (as the REZQ vessels are hugely oversubscribed already just on recovery callouts, which pay far better) or c) determining what work would be necessary to clear keeping or selling the packages, they remain in perpetual transit, largely forbidden to be touched by employees.

Some things are really not meant to be abandoned in transit, though. Like cryogenically-dormant lab-engineered experimental creatures designed to aid interrogation for the purposes of corporate espionage by the emission of psychotropic disinhibiting hormones and the microscopic reading of paralinguistic cues. Especially if the cryogenics cell on the transit unit only has a relatively short shelf life. Especially if the fumes from PHOME tend to make the creature aggressive.

Polygraphene Hardening Obsequent Mass Expediator (or PHOME™) is the deep space recovery operative’s all-purpose problem-solver. Electrical fires, middle-of-the-night asteroid strike hull breaches, fatigued steel joists or disintegrating airlock doors–PHOME fixes them all in a flash.

Usually kept either pre-mixed or, for longer-term storage, in its stabler precursor form of two cocktails of chemicals, PHOME comes in consumable formats ranging from cannister cartridges for handheld PHOME throwers, to giant vats that can supply a network of PHOME hoses distributed throughout larger ships. It’s available in a variety of colours, but is most often seen in a bright pink. Craft like Thom’s REZQ vessel Angel Fish often have integral PHOME storage and distribution systems for both internal and external work. And certainly, one of various different types of portable, cartridge-fuelled PHOME throwers would be one of the essential tools that Thom brings with him on almost any REZQ job.

This cheap, useful, abundant chemical problem-solver brings its own different kind of cost, of course: it’s extremely neurotoxic whether inhaled or ingested, corrosive in its bonding properties, mutagenic, faintly radioactive, explosive if left to decay too long in its mixed state, has fumes that cause aggression in some creatures, and can react bizarrely and unpredictably when coming into contact with some substances (many of which are commonly found on spacecraft, such as Salient fuel waste). While the PHOME parent company has largely kept the information under wraps, long-term exposure can cause mutation, dementia, and several different forms of cancers.

And don’t, for the love of God, get it on you. It sets harder than Inconel 625. Get it in your eyes, and you’re gonna need new eyes. Probably a new skull.

[Note included with package couriered to Angel Fish]

Dear REZQ Family Member (Peripatetic Frontine Support Team)

Please find enclosed this period’s company-supplied Festive Holiday Celebration Kit, with a retro-style plastic “christmas card”, Celebratory Refreshments including a can of SHARP PAIN EXTREME FESTIVE BEER*, pellets of turkey and cranberry flavoured gum, and an on-brand high-visibility festive cracker (which in turn contains a high-visibility synthetic paper crown).

We have provided a sample of SHARP PAIN EXTREME FESTIVE BEER to ensure your team’s festive break period is marked with adequate enthusiasm, in line with our company vision and brand development guidelines. Correspondingly, REZQ Family Members are expected to produce adequate image records to be shared with the REZQ corporate marketing team for potential promotional use. Any photographic records (e.g. “selfies”) must both embody and encourage an appropriate Sentiment, so it is advisable that you use this intoxicating beverage to lower your inhibitions to a level that will allow a convincing display of enjoyment in promotional images. Please note that REZQ Family Members are only permitted to consume Celebratory Refreshments produced by companies in REZQ’s corporate group, and only according to your nutritional profile.

Please also remain aware of your latest Festive Period Addendum to your Expenditure Profile: company-wide targets mandate your participation in minimum purchase targets of eligible corporate group products within the Festive Period (the specific boundaries of your Festive Period are mutable and will be denoted by your vessel’s calendar management program).

*Cost of SHARP PAIN EXTREME FESTIVE BEER is deducted from REZQ Family Members’ invoiced payments and/or added to your Running Balance as appropriate. Receipt of this Seasonal Gift is mandatory whether consumed or not, and is non refundable.

“Uh, hold still, sir; fighting it just makes it hurt.”

Whether or not you can truly “buy time” is a matter for the companies who fight a PR battle of attrition over which corporate-sponsored calendar is the one everybody should be using to keep track of the date. But on a day-to-day basis–again, assuming that there can be some kind of contingent consensus on what even counts as a “day”–the one thing that everyone can agree on is that there is just not enough time.

Nothing new there of course. People have been trying to cram two hours work into one hour for centuries–though again, with “centuries” being a term owned wholly by a company currently in a hostile takeover limbo, it’s not a term anybody can use in print.

The key point here is that, moment-to-moment, trying to find ways of just slowing things down is not a new concern, especially when you’re dealing with complex, delicate, multi-faceted work that involves a great deal of risk to your clients.

The invention of the Stasis Thrower was a landmark in dealing with these kinds of issues. It’s a “portable” device, based on something of a crude adaptation of an earlier technology whose patent had been ignored by its registrant until it had expired. The original designers of the technology had failed to make it stick in its original purpose as an alternative to expensive cryosleep-based suspended animation system for deep space travel (partly because of the discovery and rapid advent of Salient FTL, and partly because it had a tendency to kill people who were held in its stasis field for more than a few minutes if improperly configured). The patent trolls who acquired the right to adapt the technology were originally planning to use it as an anti-ageing technology, but it turned out to be much more useful when married with some basic context analysis sensors and stuffed into a backpack with a handheld dispersal unit.

With a Stasis Thrower, you can point at a person or thing, and pull them temporarily out of time: out of cause and effect; out of entropy; out of everything. Manipulation of the field with the Thrower allows you to move the person or object around despite this apparent uncoupling from reality, making it a tremendously useful tool for, say, a REZQ recovery operative to put an awkward situation on hold (a wounded client; a Salient Core going critical; an aggressive security system) while he figures out a solution.

Risks of using the Stasis Thrower largely centre around its relatively poor ability to read context: it’s supposed to be able to distinguish a person from their surroundings, but it’s not always successful in doing so, meaning it’s sometimes easy to make holes in things that don’t need holes, or Brundlefly people into fusion with inanimate objects. Improper configuration can also cause bizarre effects such as instantaneous but uneven cell ageing (imagine accidentally giving a 42 year old client a 104 year old left hand). Using without a properly-charged power source can end up with the field dying before the process is complete, phasing the target partially out of time and causing them to experience what they subjectively feel is a billion years in what, to the Stasis operator, is just a few seconds.

Like most things Thom does in the line of his work, every use of the Stasis Thrower is a roll of the dice. Every time he uses it, he wonders if it’ll be the time he kills someone–or worse.

So you’ve been called out to a stranded old early-generation Cruise Liner, running one of the only saleable routes not already monopolised by the newer, larger cruising companies, and whose groaning, dying FTL system has finally given up the ghost. Only to be expected, really; it probably should have never been retrofitted for Salient anyway.  What complicates things is that there’s a tight deadline for getting the guests back to the terminal, and without an FTL drive, that’s a deadline that’ll be missed by several hundred thousand years.

So, pushed for time, Thom undertakes an FTL hack that someone much smarter than him had told him about once: you can “tow” another ship in the wake of your own ship’s FTL by moving the two vessels close together and overdriving your own FTL drive, expanding the area of effect to take into account the ship you wish to tow. Fire up your FTL, head to your destination, and you’ll bring the other ship with you.

Dangerous? Yes. Stupid? Very extremely definitely yes.

Thom is a lot of things–a nice enough guy, if tired and depressed, and someone who, deep down, really does want to help people, and do a good job of it. But one thing he is not is an expert in Faster-than-Light physics. Certainly not enough of one to consider all of the unintended consequences of a plan like this. And, under extreme pressure,  with customers and their customers shouting at him, he’s even less likely to think through the practical permutations of an idea that, right then, seemed like it’d immediately short-circuit the problem to its solution.

With the clock ticking, and staring down the barrel of a huge salary sanction for failing to get a REZQ operation done in the target time, Thom, like most people in his situation, would be willing to try almost anything, without a serious consideration of how it could go wrong. So he didn’t realise that this kind of thing only works if the vessel being towed is of relatively modest mass and dimensions (certainly more modest than the ship doing the towing). And thus that the FTL area of effect for a ship like Angel Fish, while large, is not enough to pull a whole Cruise Liner with it.

Just…part of it.

And it didn’t even end up in the correct destination the additional mass must have thrown off the chaos calculations. Jumping into a low orbit around some planet or other, the ripped-off chunk of the ship he’d taken with him had soon fallen to the ground like a brick. Only the thick atmosphere and low gravity saved him.

Did anyone die? Who’s responsible? Who’s gonna be sued? Who’s gonna end up in a Debtors’ Colony? The “captain” of the cruise liner (more of a caretaker than anything, though he did have a nice hat) sanctioned the plan. Thing is, Thom’s now so far from a signal that it’s not something he’s going to be able to find out in a hurry. So he’ll worry about what’s going to happen to his Running Balance later. Right now he has to figure out how the hell to get off this planet.

Perfecting FTL travel was the beginning of the end for the Salient company.

Salient are another victim of the vast transformations in society brought about by the economic singularity of algorithmic growth, partly made possible by their own innovation–Salient “true”* FTL made possible the infinite permutations of instantaenous deep-space travel (versus the unreliable pseudo-FTL spacetime-bending, teleportation and sublight systems that had enabled the first waves of real human colonisation of space).

While Salient successfully maintained an exclusive control of the technology, and nobody has yet managed to copy it, they were victims of their naivety about capital, and how it can flow through barriers that can deter almost any other foe–meaning that suddenly it was unclear who “Salient” were. Complex strategic buyouts by other companies and the salami-sliced securing of bits and pieces of the corporation gradually gutted Salient beyond recognition. Now, of the original structure of the company, virtually nothing remains: none of the same research talent, shareholders, directors, or corporate structure. Like almost every other company in this galaxy, it’s a wave in a churning ocean of capital, disintegrating and then metastasising elsewhere in a continual chaos of ownership.

Most importantly, the fundamental understanding of the technology is gone. Salient FTL requires two elements: a Salient FTL drive, and a special kind of reactor core, designed specifically to work with Salient FTL drives, but which can be retrofitted into most existing spacecraft power plants and use conventional starship fuels (making them “Salient Compliant”). The small group of scientists and engineers who originally designed and built the prototypes of these two elements were silenced by the most cast-iron non-disclosure agreement of all: being quietly murdered by their own company when Salient technology started to look like it really was going to transform deep-space travel for good. In a tediously short-sighted move, it was decided that their knowledge was too valuable to be leaked to competitors, and they weren’t needed any more by the company. After all, Salient-compliant reactor cores and FTL drives were, as they are now, produced in fully-automated factories whose setup was supervised by the original creators. The control computers’ quantum encryption, airgapped data warehouses and high-precision work with deadly synthesised elements mean that there’s no real scope for reverse-engineering. The unique capacitors inside Salient FTL units disintegrate on being unsealed (as well as giving off a lethal dose of various types of highly-penetrating radiation) so it’s not like you can really take one apart and look inside either.

Sure, their brand is used by a lot of companies making peripheral technologies, through a complex palimpsest of licensing and subcontracting–much like cheap sportswear retailers might buy up the branding of a faded but beloved icon to slap on cheap clothing to enhance its apparent value. And, ultimately, all the tertiary peripherals work with the same reactor cores and drives. There’s a whole sub-economy of companies built around, for instance, the input/output controllers that regulate Salient FTL units and process the chaos mathematics that they require as an input. And indeed, some headway has been made by hackers in modifying the cheaper single-use disposable Salient-compliant reactor cores so that they can be reused a few times–though with decreasing reliability and increasing risk. Though this last achievement isn’t really a significant step forward in understanding the reactor core itself, but about defeating a self-destructing coolant system designed to artificially stop the core being reused.

The truth–and, really, the point here–is that nobody actually knows any more exactly how Salient-based FTL travel works. The knowledge, like so many other things, has been cast aside based on a short-term profit/loss calculation. It seems to be based on folding space in on itself and punching temporary, self-collapsing wormholes, but that’s certainly not a given, and even if it is, how the fuck do you even do that? Ultimately, if a reusable Salient reactor core fails, you put in a new one. If you hear that an FTL drive has gone supernova for no apparent reason, it’s really just a case of shrugging and hoping it doesn’t happen to yours.

*”True” FTL is something of a misnomer given that the poor understanding of the technology makes such comparisons unreliable–and if, indeed, it is wormhole-based, the craft in question would be moving through that channel at sublight velocities. Certainly though, it is the only technology that reliably gets your ship somewhere faster than it would if it went there in a straight line at the speed of light.