With enough probing through the system’s help interface, he figured out how to open a private channel with McManus.
“Whaddya want?”
Even through the pseudo-text, pseudo-voice, mind-fuck interface, Jax could detect the cop’s disdain. “You said you’re not taking me to ModPol.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
There was an infinite pause. “Don’t remember.”
Jax wondered if the spike would pick up his exasperation somehow. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“Look, man. You might as well forget about what’s going to happen and just let it happen.”
Jax boiled. He wasn’t going to let the cop off that easily. “It’s a long flight, Sergeant, and we’ve got literally nothing to do for, what, days?”
“Ten days.”
“So talk to me. Obviously I’m not going anywhere.”
“You just don’t get it, do you Jackson?” the reply snapped back. “People like you and me, we’re just tools, okay? We’re not in control. They are. We do their will. Most of the time without even knowing it.”
“Speak for yourself—”
“No, I’m speaking for you, domer. You were born to work and eat and sleep. Part of a herd. Like an animal from Earth.”
“You’re from Barnard-3, aren’t you?” Jax said, but it felt like a desperate comeback. “You’re as much of a domer as I am.”
“I was,” he said. “I started to see it, when I joined ModPol. Getting out of the domes. Seeing the world from the outside.”
“And now I see it too,” Jax tried. “I’ve been out for—”
“Sure, yeah. You’ve been a fugitive for a little while. Bouncing around the stars, making a big fat mess wherever you go. But you don’t know what a real life outside the shelter is like.”
But Jax did know. He didn’t know from his own experience, but he became close with people who grew up on Terroneous. He tried to understand, tried to feel what it was like for them, how hard it was, and yet their ability to push through. He needed to understand that drive, that hope in the face of hopelessness. “It’s survival,” he said. “Survival above everything.”
Another infinite silence, then McManus returned. “Yeah. Sometimes to survive though, it means someone else doesn’t.”
The suppressed thoughts crawled their way forward through Jax’s black mind. He fought them, but he was tired, weak. X, they demanded. You never really escaped.
“Do you know Mark Phonson?” he transmitted.
There was a brief pause before McManus replied, “No.”
“Mark Xavier Phonson,” Jax said. “To some only known by the initial of his middle name.”
“What is this, some kind of riddle?”
“That’s what this is, then?” Jax could sense the hesitation in McManus’s transmission. He needed to push. “I die, and you live another day?”
There was a break so long that Jax almost checked the connection to see if he was still part of the lounge network. “Yes,” McManus said finally. “It’s X.”
In the midst of Xarp-sickness, Jax didn’t think his stomach could get any hollower, but there it was. A hole rolled throughout his insides. And he understood why McManus couldn’t go back empty-handed. X would want to see Jax – the eternal thorn in his side – disappear for good. He’d want to see it with his own eyes.
“You can’t,” Jax said. “You can’t take me to X.”
“So you know who this X guy is,” McManus said. The transmission carried mirth. “I don’t. I don’t even know who he is. But I know when someone has enough power to destroy. And to do it without anyone knowing who he is.”
“He’s—”
“And I don’t want to know.”
McManus left the channel.
In the emptiness that followed, Jax’s mind conjured worst-case projections. He was not going to be arrested and thrown in prison for an extended period of time. He was going to be killed. Possibly tortured. It was possible that X wanted him for information, wanted to know what Jax knew, as if Jax knew any goddamn thing anyway. Why did someone so strong have to spend so much effort on someone as weak as Jax? He was perfectly willing to crawl under a rock and let the whole thing go.
But X wasn’t going for that. A man that powerful must be sufficiently paranoid, and whether Jax was a threat or not didn’t matter. He would err on the side of caution and assume Jax could be the piece that brings him down.
For an immeasurable time, Jax wandered the channels of the lounge interface. Flipped past the old recordings and replays, past the bad fiction, past the mindless games. There were some historical entries, something akin to school-age education, and there were dreadful trainings on banal police procedures. Out of sheer boredom, he sifted through the trainings until he found one that was a basic overview of the local computer operating system. Specifically, it was Roscorp Common Machine Integration Operating System, 4.5.2.g.13, with a laundry list of management modules installed. Jax didn’t recognize most of these, but based on their cryptic names, decided they must have had something to do with making an interstellar ship work. A few he did recognize, and with a little more prodding – listing and scanning files – he realized that Roscorp must license life-support operations from Vitality Systems. The very same Vitality Systems that built the life-support equipment that Jax operated back on Barnard-4. The equipment that managed to fail spectacularly when hacked, performing its function in the exact opposite manner than designed.
The training would have been numbingly boring if Jax weren’t already numb and bored, but he suffered through it anyway. His reward was the quick aside that the command interface could be accessed by the lounge system if necessary. This access was apparently out of scope for the basic training, but once it ended, he had some ideas about what to poke next.
And that was how, by combing through help pages and trial and error, he found the command interface. It wasn’t protected – and Jax wasn’t really surprised. It was the local-network protection fallacy: systems like this were designed never to be exposed to anything outside of the ship, so what need was there for protection?
The engineers who built the system didn’t envision a scenario where cops take a computer operator into custody, then connect him to the lounge system for several days with nothing better to do but poke around. And poke he did.
Nine days in Xarp space, in a damn dropship. No sleeping tubes. Lucky Jerk, always prepared, had packs of Delirium-G hidden in pockets all over his flight uniform. But when he dug them all out and pooled them together, there were only a handful of doses. Dava, Lucky, and Thompson had to share them. Which meant rationing. Which meant going for hours, riding Xarp raw, pulling spacetime out of reality and into some mindless dimension where nothing meant anything, pulling it thinner and thinner until that point where they wanted to just die and end it all. Open up the windows and suck out to the black. Welcome oblivion. And just before reaching that tipping point, popping a pill and zonking out. A different kind of mindlessness. One of acceptance. Of disconnection.
And with the mindlessness, with the emptiness, old ghosts came to fill the void. They came because they’d been dodged too often. Sidestepped with the day-to-day fight for survival. They came because in the emptiness, they could not be ignored.
“Lay