for the financial equivalent of two arms, a leg, and the promised delivery of your firstborn.
The Earthview Lounge next door, however, was a bit … livelier. Naked FAB waitresses, live sex shows on the black, fur-padded central stage, and throbbing, full-sensory music fed directly through the patrons’ implants and going straight to those parts of the brain responsible for hearing and feeling. And the girls were gorgeous, ranging from exotic genies to BTL sexbots to winsome girl-next-door types. The joint wasn’t reserved for the military, not officially, anyway, but I doubt that most civilians were all that comfortable there. The fleet was in, and enlisted personnel tended to get a bit territorial with their liberty hot spots.
Doob and Machine and I let the door deduct the cover charge from our eccounts and we wandered in, looking for good seats. An enthusiastic ménage-à-quatre was writhing away on the stage, backlit by the half-full Earth, and the place was flooded with blue-silver earthlight. A hostess wearing a plastic smile and some luminous animated tattoos showed us to a table close to the entertainment and took our drink orders. The mood music, a piece I half recognized by Apokyleptos, literally felt like hands running over my body; the audible part was too damned loud, but I dialed my reception down a bit and it was okay after that.
A waitress brought us our drinks and one of those smiles, and we leaned back in the chairs to enjoy the show. I’d ordered a hyperbolic trajectory—vodka, white rum, metafuel, and blue incandescence. I tossed it back, shuddered through the burn, and after that I didn’t care quite so much about screwing up with Howell. After my second glass, I didn’t care at all about Howell, and after the third I didn’t care much about anything.
“So I hear you didn’t get booted from the program,” Machine said. “Lucky.”
“I guess,” I said, but without much enthusiasm. “I’ve been having second thoughts, y’know?”
“What, about going FMF?” Doob asked. “Shit, every Corpsman wants to go FMF! Best of the best, right?”
“S’okay,” I said, shrugging, “if you like jarheads.” My lips felt numb and I was having some trouble shaping the words.
“Don’t you?” McKean asked.
“Sure, when the bastards aren’t trying to put something over on you.” I was still feeling burned by Howell’s attempt to get another shot of nano.
“So why did you volunteer for FMF in the first place?” Dubois asked. “You coulda put in your four and gotten out.”
Four years was the minimum enlistment period for the Navy. To get FMF, I’d had to “ship for six,” as we say, extending my enlistment to ten years, total.
I shrugged. “I wanted to get rich, of course.”
NO ONE JOINS THE NAVY TO GET RICH, OF COURSE. YOU GET ROOM and board and some great opportunities to travel, sure, but base pay is about a twelfth what a good systems programmer gets on the outside, and maybe a quarter of the take-home pay of a ’bot director at an e-car manufactory. No one, unless you take the long view, and have a father who’s senior vice president of research and development for General Nanodynamics.
Lots of medical doctors get their start in the Hospital Corps. It offers a good, basic education in general medicine and applied nano, and universities with medical programs smile on ex-corpsmen looking for grants or scholarships. But the economic rewards can be even bigger when what you bring home is a cool and useful bit of xenotech.
That’s because, anymore, Navy Corpsmen aren’t just the enlisted medics for the Marines and Navy. Because of their technical training, and the fact that in the field and they’re already lugging around a fair amount of specialized gear, they’re also the science technicians for any military field op. Sampling the local atmosphere, studying the biosphere and reporting on what might bite, and even establishing first contact with the locals all fall into a Corpsman’s MOS, his military occupational specialty—his job description, if you like.
And that means that Corpsmen are perfectly placed to pick up alien technologies when they make first contact, or to bring home innovative ways of utilizing human nanotech. They even get to keep the military-issued CDF hardware that allows in-head linking, and that can provide a hell of a competitive advantage in the civilian world.
So when I finished the series on my basic education downloads, my father, Spencer Carlyle, suggested that I might want to join the Navy—specifically the Hospital Corps—in order to learn skills that would benefit both me and the family.
My grandfather went to work for General Nanodynamics sixty-three years ago when it was a data-mining start-up, wading through the Encyclopedia Galactica’s hundreds of millions of hours of data, finding the codes that would unlock its secrets and release untold alien secrets of science, technology, and art that we could apply here on Earth. Better, though, is to go straight to the source, to actually learn new methods of materials manufacturing or chemistry or medicine directly from a living xenoculture. It’s one thing to pull off the EG’s stats on the X’ghr and learn that they’re very good at biochemistry. It’s something quite else to visit the aliens in person and pick their brains.
In 2212, my father led the General Nanodynamics team that developed cybertelomeric engineering from the data brought back from direct contact with the X’ghr eight years earlier.
Telomeres are the end-caps that keep chromosomes from unraveling, but they grow shorter with each division of the cell. When the telomeres wear away after forty or fifty divisions, the cell dies and aging sets in. Cybertelomerics refers to various means of controlling or guiding telomere replication inside cells without generating the out-of-control cell growth and immortality known as a cancer. As a result, humans alive today can expect to live two or three hundred years or more, rejuve treatments can have an eighty-year-old looking like forty, and clinical immortality might be just around the corner. Whether or not human immortality is a good thing is beside the point; the biochemical data brought back from the X’ghr homeworld by the crew of the Hippocrates promises to utterly transform what it means to be human.
That one bit of xenotech should have made my family quite wealthy.
It didn’t. That was because the government stepped in and declared telomere therapy a national asset, with patents owned and controlled by the Commonwealth Institute of Health. Dad got a pat on the back and a nice bonus, but do you have any idea how much rich old people would pay for treatments that would keep them going for another couple of centuries? Or keep them looking and performing like VR sex stars?
But the government wants to maintain control of who gets rejuve treatments, at least for now. They say it’s to prevent runaway overpopulation; Dad was convinced that we’re going to have a lot of very young-looking senators, presidents, and wealthy campaign contributors over the next few centuries.
Cynical? Sure. And he managed to infect me with his bitterness as well. Government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich: it’s a system that’s been around for an obscenely long time, and one that’s very hard to fight. So Dad set out not to fight the system so much as to work with it. If we could nail down another big advance in medicine, materials processing, or chemistry from an untapped xenotech source, we might be able to exploit it off-world—at one of the free-market colonies, maybe—and do it in such a way that the Commonwealth couldn’t touch it.
That was the plan, at any rate. Nanotechnics is highly competitive, and new developments and techniques are coming along every day. The field is dominated by three or four big megacorporations and a dozen smaller ones, and the company that doesn’t keep up is going to find itself
