AE in the Irish Theosophist | Page 2

come back to your original departure planet rich.
I'm hoping those decades softened the memory of my departure.
"Son of a bitch," Suzie says, realizing who I am.
"I need help Suzie. Please. Do you still work for the Air Guard?"
She shakes her head.
"Sixty freaking years, Vincent. Sixty."
"I'm so sorry, I can explain, but right now I'm handcuffed in the gondola of an airship and I need your help."
"Do you realize I've had a whole life since then? A marriage? Kids? Grandkids?"
I pause.
"We could talk about this over coffee, or something. After you help me?"
"If you can call me you should have called the Guard yourself," Suzie says, and hangs up.
I mouth the ballgag for several seconds, then redial.
It's the secretary.
"She doesn't want to talk to you," the younger image of Suzie says. "She's really pretty ticked that you even dredged all those old memories back up for her. You left her after taking all her money, and even worse, you didn't even tell her you were leaving. You know she would have given you the money if you would have asked."
"I'm so sorry to be doing this." I sigh around the edges the rubber ball. "I don't know what else to do. My Id became a persona inside of my own neural network, and now it's taken me over."
"Well you really messed her up. She lied, you know, she never actually had a husband or grandkids, she just threw herself into work. For a while she became part of an anti-Spacer activist group," the secretary leans forward. "Look, you could just turn off all your neural devices and go totally normal, just regular wetware."
"That's a bit drastic, isn't it?" I've been wired since, well, as long as I can remember. I wouldn't be able to make calls, check up on info, see floating data tips around me, if I shut it all down. I'd be just like the colonists staring at me.
"People on Riley manage it all that time. Not everyone is a high rolling spacer."
The secretary smiles. Funny tickly feelings are running up and down my chip-packed spine. I ignore them.
"And if you buy yourself some time, I imagine I could work the old lady over, if you know what I mean." She winks. "There are, after all, some very good memories we're dredging up as well."
She's gone.
It's a bit of a flimsy plan, but it beats calling the Air Guard directly and guaranteeing arrest. Susie might still fly out and rescue us.
Vince sits next to me.
"I think that's a bad idea," he says. "I've been trying to keep you occupied and distracted. Which is easy by the way, I didn't want you to think of doing that."
Hah.
I start getting the codes ready.
"Just ponder this," Vince says, leaning closer to me. "I'm always the one that comes up with the good plans. I always get us out of the bad scrapes on instinct. I always get the girl when you stop over thinking things. You have to trust me."
Good plans my ass. I'd been unaware of my Id until he'd started giving me anonymous messages, leaving links to stories about a lost aerostat city that had kept actual gold bars in its bank, now abandoned and waiting for someone to plunder it. My Id has gone insane. He splintered off into his own personality when I'd started resisting his plan to go down searching the lower atmosphere for this mythical lost city.
"I'm taking good care of us right now. This is all part of a plan."
I initiate a shut down.
Vince finally flickers away.

#

It's different going a hundred percent wetware. When I look out the observation windows I can't see little weather tags telling me where the thermals around us are. People's public ID info sheets don't hover over their heads.
But I can wiggle my fingers and move my hands.
I rip off the ball gag and take a deep breath, then stand up. The colonists flinch.
"It's okay," I reassure them. "I'm okay now."
They don't believe it.
"I had a software problem," I explain, wiping my cracked lips with the sleeve of my dress shirt. "My personality kinda got messed up and split, then the splinter tried to take me over. Bit of a glitch in the programming allows that."
One of them raises his hand.
"So which one is in charge now?"
"I am," I say brightly. "I'm Vincent."
They all chorus: "Hi Vincent."
I nod.
"Vince is gone now, so we're all okay. He was the one that knocked out the pilot and reprogrammed the airship. I'm more normal."
One of the colonists leans over to the purple corseted lady and stage whispers, "Does this happen to off-worlders often?"
She shakes her head.
"So . . ." I say. "Can we wake the pilot up now?"
They enthusiastically approve of this course of action.
We trudge over to the front of the gondola