Robot Captain

By Doug Bedwell

Aboard the starship Undertoe, a skeleton crew of misfits takes orders from a smugly bureaucratic computer which couldn't care less if they live or die.  The Undertoe is part of the Galactic Freedom Corporation, a huge interstellar conglomerate whose owner -- the inconceivably wealthy Largo Foote -- has a cunning scheme

• Language: English
• Publisher: Space Bear Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781943219056

Doug Bedwell

The range and variety of Doug Bedwell's writing reflects the eclectic nature of his literary influences. These include science fiction and fantasy stalwarts such as J.R.R. Tolkien and Isaac Asimov, but also writers of many other genres and traditions. His writing has been especially influenced by his study of dramatic literature, including the works of playwrights both ancient and modern, such as Maeterlinck, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and countless others. He has written over fifty plays, which have been presented at professional, academic, and community theatres nationwide. In 2015, Space Bear Press published a collection of those pieces as a two-volume set. His first novel, the comic science fiction adventure Robot Captain was published in 2016. He has also released a small collection of poetry, titled Wastewood.

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PROLOGUE:

The History of the Galaxy

History is written in pencil.

-- The Book of Vekk

Galactic History – An Introduction

In theory, history is a reasoned and objective study of the past. Things happen, someone writes those things down, and then someone else uses those records to reconstruct how a chain of events led to a particular result.

This is, of course, almost total nonsense.

In practice, history is a futile attempt to make sense of all the crazy. This is doubly true for any attempt to chronicle something as chaotically sprawling and vastly complex as the history of the galaxy, which is why most sane and sensible historians don't even bother.

However, it seems only polite to offer readers at least a modicum of background information before proceeding with the main narrative of the book. And so, for those daring and curious persons who would like to briefly acquaint themselves with some of the most essential points of galactic history, a somewhat cursory treatment of the topic is presented below.

Human Society and the Dominion of the Bloaps

One thing that every sentient species eventually has to deal with is what to do with all of the absolute worst people in society – mass murderers, delusional maniacs, paranoid psychotics, investment bankers and so on. The humans of planet Earth settled on a curious and wholely unique solution to this problem. Rather than marginalizing these members of society as all other sentient species did, humans instead opted to elevate them to positions of enormous wealth, prestige, and power. Bankers, lawyers, and other awful persons – or bloaps as they were generally referred to by more conventional species – tended to control nearly all of human society's political and financial decisions.

As a consequence, the Earth became an increasingly unpleasant place to live. Since business interests were considered to be paramount, and since corporate profits relied on a large consumer base, no serious steps were taken toward population control – aside from occasional wars that were initiated to help sustain the armaments industry. And, since sex was just about the only pleasant diversion that many people could afford, the Earth's population continued to grow. More people meant more pollution, which caused planetary temperatures to rise, which caused the polar ice caps to melt, which caused many coastal areas to sink under the rising seas. This meant there were more people, trying to live on less land, which pollution was making progressively less livable.

Some historians have argued that, over the long term, this arrangement actually worked out very well. Once humans discovered faster-than-light travel, their overpopulation and military prowess allowed them to effectively conquer the rest of the galaxy within a few short centuries. Other historians however, have made the slightly more convincing assertion that the galaxy was not conquered by the human race at all, but rather by a very small handful of well-connected bloaps who reaped the (literally) astronomical rewards which grew from the efforts of countless billions of poor saps who did all the dirty work.

Toshi Perg, and the Perg Accelerator

Even the fact that the human species had the technology to carry out this conquest was largely a matter of luck. The secret of faster-than-light travel was stumbled upon quite by accident, by a very pleasant young physicist named Toshi Perg, who accelerated a microscopic dab of Gorgonzola cheese to five hundred times the speed of light while trying to optimize power consumption on an ordinary plasma-fueled sandwich toaster. The experiment unleashed a phenomenal energy cascade, which completely destroyed her laboratory and several adjacent buildings. However, due to the presence of an automated inertial dampening field – which one of her colleagues had fortuitously neglected to shut off after use – Toshi Perg herself miraculously survived.

After extensive further experimentation, and with better safety measures in place, she soon had a working prototype for a faster-than-light engine that could effectively propel a small spacecraft. Recognizing the incredible potential of her discovery, she donated the exclusive patent rights to the United Nations, in the hope that her invention would be a boon to all of humankind.

The officials entrusted with this generous gift inexplicably decided that all of humankind would best be served if they sold those rights to a massive space-travel conglomerate called the Fogmo Corporation. How exactly they came to this decision was never clearly explained, but most independent observers have always assumed that palms were greased, and deals were made. On Earth, that's just how things worked.

But regardless of how it happened, once the Fogmo Corporation had obtained the patent rights to the Perg Accelerator, they immediately locked the plans in a vault and refused to allow any space ships to be built using the new technology. They were concerned that it would cut into their interplanetary tourism monopoly.

Soon after the Fogmo Swindle, as it came to be known, Toshi Perg was caught replicating her original experiment in an unlicensed basement laboratory, and thrown into prison for violating the patent on her own invention. She was eventually paroled, given the Nobel Prize for physics, and shuffled off to teach at a small junior college in Wisconsin, where she was encouraged to keep quiet about the whole thing if she knew what was good for her.

And so, for the next fifty years nothing noteworthy happened.

But eventually, the purloined patent rights expired, and an older, wiser, and significantly more cynical Professor Perg – now well into her seventies – began hawking her original design directly to anyone who'd pay her consulting fee. Within weeks, dozens of staryards were cranking out faster-than-light scout ships that were small, sleek, unreliable, and (most importantly) cheap. Suddenly, everyone wanted to go to space, not only for the excitement and adventure, but also because the Earth had grown so overcrowded and polluted that it was fast becoming an unlivable dumpheap. Tens of thousands of explorers set out, seeking new horizons on uncharted worlds.

And, with the sudden surge in demand, Gorgonzola cheese futures skyrocketed.

Exploration and Colonization

With the advent of faster-than-light travel, the Age of Exploration began. Tiny, overpowered scout ships burst out of Earth's solar system by the thousands. For these first-generation explorers, mortality was extremely high. Those early scout ships were cheaply built using cutting-edge (i.e. largely untested) technology. Only the most intrepid and the luckiest managed to survive the outward trip, and even fewer made it back to Earth to reveal what they had found. But Earth had lots of people with not much else to do, so despite the fearful odds exploration proceeded at a furious pace.

These explorers soon discovered that the galaxy was teeming with carbon-based life forms eerily similar to those found on Earth. Certainly there were differences in the details, but the basic chemical principles of DNA, photosynthesis and so on, seemed to be almost universal features on the majority of Earth-like planets. What was rare, however, were sentient life-forms. Of all the billions of species on the tens of thousands of Earth-like planets found in millions of star systems, only a few hundred could be readily classified as intelligent, at least as humankind tended to define intelligence, i.e. advancing so far as to use basic tools and fire. Only a few dozen had built cities and civilizations of any appreciable size, and only a handful had yet ventured out into their own solar systems. Most remarkable was that none of them – yes, you read that right, none of them at all – had discovered faster-than-light space travel.

So the human race did what the human race has always done when encountering other cultures over which they held a technological advantage: They took over.

Soon, construction began on dozens of giant colony ships. Dozens soon grew to hundreds, and hundreds soon grew to thousands. The Age of Exploration gave way to the Age of Colonization. Filling these ships with eager colonists wasn't difficult, because after centuries of war, global warming, overpopulation and depleted resources, life on Earth had arguably lost its nostalgic appeal. The prospect of a fresh start on some beautiful, newly discovered, unspoilt world was more than enough inducement to cause numberless millions to brave the risks and leave their homeworld far behind.

In fact, so many people fled the Earth that those few remaining decided to cordon the place off and renovate. Abandoned space industries were commandeered and used to manufacture a massive array of defense satellites. These were disguised as comets, and hidden inside the Oort cloud. Within a hundred years, the Earth was totally isolated from the rest of the galaxy, and gradually began to recover from millenia of human damage. By the time of the events chronicled in this book, The planet was a giant nature preserve, only visited by a few thousand lucky and worshipful tourists each year.

The Post-Colonization Boom

After the frenzied and dangerous era of colonization, things settled down, and interstellar trade became the cornerstone of a new economy. Owning land, even on a planetary scale, might offer a sort of boring financial stability, but the big money was in the high-stakes arena of galaxy-wide finance, transport and exchange. Huge supercomputers churned with the daily market updates, as thousands of planetary currencies were balanced and evaluated against each other in the endless barter of goods, property and people over incredible distances. Fortunes were won and lost on futures trading, histories trading, and things-happening-right-now trading. The bloaps were on cloud nine.

In this sort of environment, information was key, and because radio waves were much too slow for communication on a galactic scale, unmanned messenger drones propelled by tiny Perg Accelerators were developed to carry messages between systems and between starships. These were officially designated Perg-Equipped Message Packets, but they were more commonly known as pemps.

While pemps were essential for making the entire galactic mercantile system possible, they also introduced a random element. Since messages had to physically travel from Point A to Point B, there was always the chance that something would go wrong, and someone would lose everything due only to a technical or timing error. Of course, for every loser, someone else (usually) came out ahead, so when looked at as a galaxy-wide average, everything appeared to be going splendidly. Civilizations could simply expand, divide, and grow like so many cells in a petri dish.

To maintain peace and resolve legal conflicts, the Galactic Confederation was formed. This was a nominal central government with a modest military and little real power. It was sufficient to settle small regional disputes, and to keep the minor corporate interests in line, but the really big players were more than it could effectively control. For the two or three dozen largest companies, there were no real constraints; they were simply too huge and too powerful to be reeled in. Usually these corporations would respect each other's economic and physical boundaries, and most minor conflicts between them were handled quietly, with little fuss. No one wanted to upset the golden apple cart. It was the closest thing to a truly stable economy that the human race had seen since the height of the Roman Empire.

The Boom Implodes

Unexpectedly, inevitably, and in retrospect predictably, the market bubble burst and the whole galactic economy collapsed. Exactly how and why it collapsed when it did is difficult to pin down, because the galaxy itself was identical before and after the crash – same planets, same starships, same intelligent life forms. The only things that changed were the numbers registered on the official trading computers of the Galactic Exchange, which swore up and down that everyone was suddenly bankrupt.

Chaos and panic ensued, or so the story goes, though really life on most planets went on almost entirely unchanged. People still lived, died, worked, and made little people just as they always had. But for the bloaps who controlled the giant corporations, The Great Collapse as it came to be known, was a time of disaster and devastation.

There was, however, one notable exception. A medium-sized corporation, ambitiously called Own Everything, Inc. seemed to be doing just fine, despite the general turmoil. Given OEI's inexplicable solvency, Legni Foote, the company's CEO and sole stockholder, immediately began buying up collapsing corporations left and right at rock-bottom prices. Suddenly, within a few weeks of the initial collapse, the name Own Everything, Inc. had gone from symbolizing the company's overly-ambitious and unachievable goal, to being a fairly accurate description of the company's holdings. In terms of interplanetary trade and finance, OEI did own practically everything, or at least everything that seemed to be worth owning.

Though some starry-eyed economists have attributed the rise of OEI to Legni Foote's singular genius in market management, reality is rather less reverential. The only reason OEI didn't go bust at the same time as all the other major corporations was that the pemp carrying its financial data was delayed in transit by an unexpected ion storm, and ended up arriving almost two months late. Once it arrived, and the financial situation was fully updated, Legni Foote was officially just as bankrupt as everyone else.

But it was too late. All the other corporate foreclosures had already been processed, the companies dissolved, and most of their senior executives quickly hired into mid-level positions in OEI. By the time OEI went under, there was no one left that was big enough to collect on the debt. As the last corporation standing, it was technically in debt only to itself. And, as the sole stockholder in the only remaining major corporation, Legni Foote didn't rule the galaxy, he owned it. That ownership, however, was both tenuous and short-lived.

The Fragmentation

Within weeks after the collapse of the galactic economy came the collapse of the Galactic Confederation. The GC had never been a particularly stable or effective body, even in the best of times. Now, without the tax revenues, bribes, and corporate kickbacks that had long lubricated the rusty gears of its bureaucracy, it all ground to a halt.

Had OEI been able to step in and stabilize the imploding galactic government, Legni Foote would have been well positioned to name himself Emperor, or Kahn, or The Grand High Fubar, or any other impressive-sounding title that fit his fancy. But that didn't happen. As it turned out, OEI had obtained so many new holdings in such a short time that it didn't have the liquidity or the organizational capacity to prevent the Galactic Confederation's collapse, or the rapid fragmentation that followed.

As far as most of the individual star systems were concerned, the loss of the Galactic Confederation was more blessing than curse. To be sure, there were many serious repercussions that caused significant hardship for no small number of planets and populations. But once the situation began to stabilize, most systems were able to rebuild their economies on a smaller scale. After centuries of exploration, expansion and development, most people were sick to death of the whole business, and just wanted a little peace and quiet.

The one institution of the Galactic Confederation that survived the crash was the Galactic Exchange. The Exchange had long been the most important trading hub and data repository in the galaxy, and it still was, even if its prestige and power had diminished considerably. It still held the official registration documents that backed up OEI's ownership claims, but without the authority of the GC behind them, those documents were worth less than the ones and zeroes used to record them. Legni Foote could assert all the claims of ownership he wanted, but local star systems rejected those claims out of hand. The bulk of his planetary resources were seized or appropriated by resident populations.

But what Legni did have was his massive corporate bureaucracy, as well as his industrial and commercial fleets. Within seven years after the Great Collapse, OEI had stabilized as a monolithic break-even proposition, controlling slightly less than half of all the economic activity in the galaxy.

Recent History to the Present Day

In the years that followed the Great Collapse, Legni Foote could never understand the hostility many star systems seemed to harbor toward himself and OEI. Some people had even suggested that the whole thing was somehow his fault, or at least the fault of bloaps in general, and either way he felt he was getting more than his fair share of the blame. As far as he was concerned, the whole kerfuffle was completely ridiculous – he was just an innocent bystander like everyone else, and if he somehow profited by the whole affair that was simply good business. He couldn't see what everyone was making such a fuss over.

Still, no matter how unreasonable Old Legni thought the galaxy's prevailing attitude toward him was, he recognized that it was cutting into his properties and profit margins at an alarming rate. Clearly, something had to be done, and so he consulted with his top advisors on how best to address the situation. In a rare show of unanimity, all of these advisors agreed that OEI had an image problem.

Various solutions were offered. Some of his advisors proposed large-scale rebuilding efforts on particularly hard-hit worlds. Others suggested the founding of universities, hospitals and other vital institutions which would benefit struggling populations. Some favored museums, sports arenas and other venues of public entertainment to distract and amuse the increasingly hostile galactic citizenry.

Legni Foote, however, rejected every proposal that his advisors presented to him. In his mind, each of their proposals suffered from the same critical failing: They would cost him money. Instead, he decided to address the company's image problem by changing its name from Own Everything Incorporated to the much more inspired and (he hoped) inspiring Galactic Freedom Corporation. He fired all of his top advisors, and used the money he saved to launch an extensive rebranding campaign.

Less than a year after that campaign was initiated, Old Legni made his last major decision as head of OEI/GFC. He died. As his only child had preceded him in death by about 45 minutes – in a tragic hail of blaster fire at his father's bedside – control of the company passed to Legni's astonishing and wholely remarkable grandson Largo.

According to all officially authorized accounts, Largo Foote was indeed a remarkable man, and fully deserved his status as the galaxy's richest lifeform. Even as a young boy, he'd exhibited the foresight and singular genius to be born as Legni Foote's only grandchild, and the sole heir to his fabulous fortune and vast corporate empire. No other person, living or dead, could make that claim. Now in the prime of his life, he could single-handedly orchestrate the massively intricate bureaucracy of the entire Galactic Freedom Corporation without help from anyone at all, aside from his many thousands of executive assistants and their billions of subordinates. He never made a bad decision, largely because he was so inconceivably wealthy that any decision he made was by definition the right one. The sheer magnitude of his financial assets could rupture the fabric of space and time. Indeed, Largo Foote had never faced an obstacle he could not overcome, which was possibly because he had never faced an obstacle, period.

This was the man upon whose merest whim the lives and livelihoods of 40% of the galaxy's sentient population now directly depended. Without him, these poor unfortunates would have had to scratch out whatever meager existence their wits and labor afforded. But because of their benefactor's limitless largess, they could instead scratch out a meager existence on whatever was left of their wits and labor after Largo Foote had taken his cut. And yet, it seemed hardly anyone ever showed him their gratitude, except for those few millions who were hired expressly for that purpose. His was a life immersed in and overflowing with almost unendurable luxury. But endure it Largo did, with questionable taste, an infinite budget, and a limitless ego.

It is at this point – twenty-five years after the Great Collapse and seventeen years after the death of Old Legni Foote – that our story begins.

Chapter 1:

The Butler

No plan survives contact with reality.

-- The Book of Vekk

Cyberthorpe D-47, or Cyrus as he had been informally dubbed, stood at the handrail near the top of