Spherical Tomi

By Jack Mangan

Caught between two powerful warlords in the far future, and trapped by the memory of the man she couldn't save, Tomi must face ghosts from her past and hide from a world that counts her its most heinous criminal. Add to this her rapidly deteriorating cloned body, falling apart just in time to meet a new invasion from an old friend, but not enough to replace, and you have an all around bad day...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creative Guy Publishing
• Release date: Apr 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781894953283

Jack Mangan

Jack Mangan is known by us (and those in the Deadpan community) as The Iron Man of Podcasting. Since 2005, Jack has been podcasting Jack Mangan’s Deadpan Podcast, a variety show that is heavy on the variety. He was also part of the podiobook vanguard on Podiobooks.com with Spherical Tomi: A Novel of Despair, a cyberpunk samurai’s tale. Jack’s short fiction has appeared in audio and in print in collections like The Amityville House of Pancakes and Podthology: The Pod Complex.This is Jack’s first steampunk work.

Book preview

Prologue

Distant explosions dotted incessantly across the screen of stars, each light momentarily altering the surrounding constellations. Wave upon wave of humanoid samurai-doh launched from the platforms of the Musashi, rushing across the void toward the Hades IV, only to be challenged halfway by the extra-humanoid itai of the Cerberan soldiers.

A 2-D screen floated inside of Tomi's Spherical, monitoring the deep-space no-man's land between Greatships. The lights of the stars and the destroyed clone bodies shone like fields of shimmering tears. Her fit of weeping had finally abated, replaced now by a state of numb emptiness. Tomi looked beyond the layers of her Spherical at the rooms of their apartment, saw some of Nez's things left carelessly out-of-place, awaiting his return. She closed her eyes, which were still numb from the attack.

Nez was among the legions of Tokugawa Samurai at the military compound outside of Musashi's capital city, all neural-logged into their itai consoles. Each samurai remotely controlled an itai clone body, wielding it through its launch across the deep-space combat zone. The samurai lived these bodies' brief, surrogate lives until their inevitable, violent deaths ejected the conscious host minds back into their bodies. No true death would ever touch a soldier riding in an itai doh, only destruction of the mindless clones they temporarily inhabited.

She suddenly became aware of a comm. window initializing within her Spherical. It was not a secretary--but the Shogun Ryogi himself on the screen, ordering her to accept his call.

She activated the screen but said nothing.

Ryogi spoke immediately, Tomi, your subordinate combat programmers have informed me that you've become unresponsive, and that your programming activities have ceased? She said nothing. Dammit, this is a critical moment in the campaign. Matahachi is swamped, doing his job and yours. We need you! What has happened?

"I hijacked Nez into one of the Cerberan itai, before it could even launch out of the Hades IV, she said softly. He managed to sneak the pirated body deep into secure areas of the Greatship and plug himself directly into the hardware that houses Hades' internal, isolated network. Not the shell systems that I can hack from here, mind you; he physically connected the itai into the hardware that manages vital ship function applications, completely unreachable via standard data channels, public or secure."

Ryogi's face lit up with hope and questions, but she continued.

"It seemed a great victory, yes. I was about to send a barrage of severe strikes into their ship's core through the bridge Nez had spliced with the hijacked itai, when the Cerberans struck back at us. I'd forgotten that President Sterling was personally running the Hades' combat programming defense. He. . . his routines and their shells were too quick for me. We traded and parried attacks for a few minutes, until Sterling burrowed a 2.92Flashbomb into my own Spherical that temporarily blinded me. While I was incapacitated, he reached through the itai bridge and sent deadly signals directly into Nez's cerebrum, via his console link. I couldn't. . . I lost him. A fresh wave of tears spilled from her new eyes. Nez is dead."

Tomi shut down the screen before she could see Ryogi's reaction.

. . .And noticed an anomaly in the code on her Spherical's seventh layer. It couldn't be, she murmured. It couldn't be. Had William Sterling somehow accidentally left one thread open on the bridge between Nez's body's console on Musashi and

his abandoned itai somewhere aboard the Hades IV? Such a mistake was far beneath a programmer as skilled as Sterling, Tomi thought. . . Was it a trap?

She sent a small, slightly visible probe through the channel. It reached the Hades' core unmolested and undetected. Amazed that it hadn't been immediately erased, she used the program's scanner routine to check on William's status. He was indeed still coding in his Spherical over there, but his attention was diverted elsewhere.

Tomi shook her head with disbelief. President William Sterling, the most proficient coder she'd ever faced, had made a critical error in his ship's defense matrix. She knew that her open channel to their core might be detected at any moment; she needed to act; she'd never hold such power over the enemy vessel again.

Dozens of 2-D screens appeared inside of her Spherical, each showing data reports outlining the vulnerabilities of the Greatship's many critical systems. She hastily considered every report, murmuring to herself. Would she simply send a command to withhold the Greatship's interior oxygen until William surrendered? Or maybe cut all power and leave the Hades an impotent, dead vessel. She could even shut down all systems pertaining to their defenses, allowing the Tokugawan itai freedom to engage and enter through the defenseless ship's hull.

Tomi's eyes glanced across the picture she and Nez had taken last month and hung here above their living room couch. A feeling as of a sharp blow struck her inside. Your death will not have been in vain, my love, she spoke. No. Here and now, the void of space will burn.

Three years later. . .

I. Orbital Debris

Van looked around the room with an expression of feigned disgust.

When I get here, I'm going to clean up this place. The 3-D projection of his disembodied head hovered an arm's length before Michi's face. She enhanced his image two clicks up to the size of a normal human head; the fist-sized image had been making her feel slightly uneasy.

Whoa, vertigo.

Yeah, I just boosted your image. The shrunken head was creeping me out.

She wasn't looking at his phone screen now, but rearranging some of the large piles of clutter in her living room. She could sense his face hanging there, watching her every move.

A 2-D screen of Jeanette materialized in thin air right next to Van. Michi smiled at her and said to Van, Hang on a second. She put him on hold, freezing the image of his face just as he began to protest.

Hey Mich, I know it's shift change time, but I have to take a break. I just finished monitoring the 4/4 inspector synthetics' run of the satellite's lower rungs; it took three fucking hours, Jeanette was smiling apologetically. You mind running the change yourself?

Not at all, J! Michi smiled back. I'll run the change; relax and enjoy yourself for awhile. You deserve a break.

You sure?

Yeah. No sweat. Hey, why don't you come up to my quarters later? Van will be here then. We can all have dinner and maybe a cup of tea together.

That sounds great Mich! I'll definitely be there.

Great! So listen, I have Van on hold right now. . .

Oh I'll let you get back to him then. He's still coming today then?

Yeah.

Are you excited about finally meeting him in his real body? Face to face?

Yeah.

What kind of enthusiasm is that? Jeanette laughed. You don't seem very excited.

I am, it's just. . . Michi looked at the frozen bust of his phone screen, wondered if he was getting annoyed at being kept on hold for so long. "I'm still not sure how I feel about Van's personality attached to that bearded, round face. I'd become so accustomed to him in the Daniel David v. 8.89 body that he'd been renting. The commercial itai's features were just so much more refined than his natural body. . ."

Oh my god Mich; I had no idea you were so shallow! Jeanette was laughing. His real body isn't pretty enough for you?

Michi laughed too. "Well, a lot of men become very different people when you meet them in their own bodies, you know? And he and I had had this great bond when we met in our itais and when he came here in the Daniel. I'm afraid it won't be the same."

Well, Jeanette said, At least he'd inhabited Daniel Davids. I've known a lot of men who prefer the Paul Jean clone series; those Paul Jeans were always assholes once you got them in their true birth bodies. Michi laughed again. You laugh because it's true. Well anyway, get back to his call; I've kept you from him long enough. I'm sure everything will be fine Mich; don't worry. See you later.

Michi clicked the comm screen out and set herself back to the task at hand. She slipped slightly off-balance as she kicked a heavy portable immersion pad across the rug. As she swept up the loose papers and cards from the carpet beneath it, she looked at the paused, still-unfamiliar face of the man with whom she'd become intimate over the past three months. Michi couldn't help but to wonder if she'd ever be forced to reveal her true identity to Van--or even that the physical appearance he attributed to 'Michi' wasn't her real birthform, but an indefinitely pirated itai. That was not a discussion she looked forward to--or ever planned to have. . .

She unlocked his screen, Sorry about that.

No problem. What were we talking about?

My messy room.

Yes, that's right. Why not have a 2/1 bot clean up for you?

I like the mess. It makes me feel comfortable, she said with a laugh. Too much order makes me feel trapped. Besides, I know where everything is in here; a 2/1 cleaning robot would put things away on me and then they'd be lost.

Ah, so it's organized chaos.

She answered with a slight nod. Plus--Jeanette's the only other live human being on this stinking satellite. She doesn't mind my mess, and other than you, she's the only visitor I ever have. Van laughed and shook his head. Now I need to ask you to hang on again, just for another minute. I need to concentrate on what I'm doing here.

No problem.

Thanks. Michi found that because of the diminishing integrity of her itai link, she had to focus a little bit harder on ordinary tasks. It had been getting worse for days now.

She'd hacked unauthorized rides into the fashionable Debbie21.0 series for her many rendezvous with Van's Daniels in the cities of Earth, Ea, and Cerberus. Having her conscious mind in those bodies had felt all right, but the illegal Michi itai onboard the Linden satellite was where she felt at home. Michi's dark skin and thicket of curly hair almost felt more natural to her now than the straight black hair and pale skin with which she'd been born. Her birth body was being kept hidden by monks in a far-away monastery satellite; it had been over five months since she'd jacked out of all itais and opened her true eyes. Michi had come to prefer being Michi.

The consequence of her prolonged usage of the Michi, however, was that her sensory motor connectors were beginning to deteriorate. In another week or two, her control over the body would be as low as fifty percent. By then her legs and arms would shake uncontrollably; she wouldn't be able to speak clearly; her finger dexterity for Spherical programming would become almost non-existent. She'd be forced to wake herself up in the monastery again and use the monks' decks to hack another black market itai form (a sensible one, preferably another Michi). But she intended to postpone seeing her old face's terrible, tainted eyes in the mirror for as long as possible. The very thought filled her with an icy dread. Even now though, she could feel the remoteness within her itai's limbs as she dragged a heavy bureau across the carpeted floor.

Once a large enough section of the living room's worn carpeting was finally cleared, she stood in the middle of the area, trembling only slightly, assessing the clutter all around her. Clothes were draped over just about every solid thing in the room, from her furniture to the haphazardly constructed piles of hardware and printed books.

She dug through a mound of stiff fabric lying in a nearby heap and came out with her small, rectangular box-shaped sphere projector. Though the plastic was scratched in many places, the screen was still intact. The bells from a pair of Chinese meditation balls chimed lightly as they rolled out from the heap of cloth and across the carpet.

So listen Van, I have to monitor the changing of a scavenging shift. I'm not sure how long I'll be.

No problem, Mich. Although I would like to stay in this screen and watch you work, if you don't mind, he looked almost embarrassed. I promise I won't say a word to distract you. It might be interesting to watch a deep space debris cleanup; I've never actually seen one. And I've nearly exhausted all the entertainment options on this shuttle. And. . . well. . . I miss you, Michi. I don't want to leave you right now.

She hated it when he said things like that, but kept the distaste from her expression. She offered him an agreeable smile and refocused on the projector box. OK, but I'm going to ignore you for a while! I need to concentrate, she lied. He nodded to acknowledge that he understood.

The projector box felt awkward in her hand, as if it were a heavy object that she'd never picked up before. It would only be a matter of time before she'd need to log out of this exhausted body and spend some time in her natural home body.

She tossed the projector box and let it land at her feet.