Pure Motives: Amsterdam Institute, #5

By R. Z. Held

Chloe thought pilot training and its accompanying implant would allow her to support her extended family in the Free Trade Zone; instead, she accidentally receives an experimental hijacking implant. Once people discover she can control others through their implants, nowhere is safe for her. From a Pax Romana research facility to a Libertad Fransa pirate ship, everyone wants to either drug her into submission or use her hijacking abilities for their own gain. With the help of her few allies, including a true AI ship, can she break truly free, or will she once more exchange one prison for another?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rhiannon Held
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781943545179

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PURE MOTIVES

By R. Z. Held

Copyright © 2022 by Rhiannon Held

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover design by Kate Marshall

https://rhiannonheld.com/

Amsterdam Institute Series

CLEAN INSTALL

DIRTY BURNOUT

FAIR EXCHANGE

UNJUST THEFT

PURE MOTIVES

BASE INSTINCTS

Table of Contents

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part I

However dangerous, long-term, it was to fall asleep in a full-sensory training sim, at least having done so before on multiple occasions made it easier for Chloe to orient herself on waking from one now. Comparatively easier. She sat up, the connector she’d instinctively jerked from the back of her neck in one hand, heart pounding from the alarm her implant system was broadcasting through her head. Was this an emergency drill?

No, it was too close to graduation time at the Traders Pilot Academy for them to be running those anymore. Chloe dropped the connector with a groan and slumped back down on the sim couch. Her implant started playing a message automatically, as she tried to blink her vision into focus. Her sister Natalie’s tone was strident with worry.

The connector cable was digging into her shoulder blade, spoiling the soft cradling of the sim couch’s polymer surface, but she left it, using the discomfort to help ground her. That would do for touch; she’d skipped smell, but she focused on hearing next anyway. The full-sensory suite was silent and empty at the moment, though it was presumably only luck and approaching graduation that had kept someone from coming in to use one of the exercise pads and finding her before now. Chloe snapped her fingers beside each of her ears in turn, focused her vision on her palm and then the ceiling, and called it good. She’d found waking up out of a sim rather than leaving a sim unexpectedly while conscious cut down on full-sensory crash-out symptoms considerably.

She sat back up with a groan and reviewed her internal system alerts. She’d set a regular alarm, but that hadn’t broken into the sim; the alarm for Natalie’s message had only done that because the message was emergency tagged. She’d given Natalie access to use that tag in case someone in the family was actively dying or similar, but Chloe honestly wasn’t surprised that saving your baby sister from being late to her hiring interview apparently also counted.

And she should be grateful Natalie had abused the tag for that very reason, she supposed. Now, did she attempt to lie in her reply? She would have liked to feel guilty even considering it, but that guilt didn’t even break the surface of her deep well of exhaustion about her whole situation. She would graduate this year; she refused to conceive of any other outcome. If running the training sims in every spare moment gave her something ostensibly productive to do so she kept calm and focused on that goal, so be it.

Also, she really was going to be late to her interview if she wasn’t careful, so she didn’t think she had time to come up with a good lie.

An impulse to drop back into the sim long enough to check her scores popped up and she crushed it ruthlessly. She knew she wouldn’t have magically sleep-tested better than the last thousand times she’d done the test awake. Instead, Chloe considered the internal system notices about the earlier videos her sister had sent, then pushed herself up. If she had any time left after she’d washed up and changed, she’d watch whatever good luck wishes the videos contained then.

A new video, marked as interleaved, came in as she was pulling on her dress uniform jacket. The timing, given the communications delay to her home planet, suggested Natalie had started recording it the instant Chloe’s message had finished playing. Chloe put it on her room’s big wall screen. Local time would be in the early evening, and it looked like Chloe had caught her sister just after dinner, holding up a tablet in a kitchen alcove while niblings clattered dishes outside of the visual pickup.

"No harm done, Chloe? Except for the mental deterioration you’re setting yourself up for, down the road! Sleeping in sims is dangerous. Promise me you’ll get medical to check you out after your interview, all right?" Natalie paused and absently scrubbed a thumb along the tattoo of a stylized grease smear along her left cheekbone, black ink standing out against her light skin, then the software stilled the image and flashed an interleave point. The software would record an answer from Chloe at each point and then play it back to Natalie with each question and response smoothly spliced in sequence.

In stillness, Natalie didn’t look too stressed—well, no more stressed than usual; running the people who ran the farm, as Chloe and their other siblings liked to joke, was a full-time job—and money must be a little less tight than usual because her brown hair had been cut in a flattering, short style that showed the hand of a professional.

Chloe glanced behind her, impulse to check her room wouldn’t look messy to a judging older sister’s gaze so ingrained it had survived well into adulthood. It was hard to sustain mess when, other than the bed cubby, that whole wall was built-in cupboards, though. She smoothed her hair as she started the recording. You know medical would lock the door if they saw me coming. She supposed that would sound to an outsider like she made a habit of falling asleep in the testing sim—all right, maybe she did, but usually no one caught her—but her family was aware of her multi-year unsuccessful battle with medical about whether her piloting implant was indeed defective.

Natalie’s recording began again. "I wish you a merciful universe of luck on that interview, of course, but are you sure you want to join CoDef?"

Chloe scrubbed her face, starting with the matching tattoo on her own cheekbone, then considered doing it again, recording it, and letting that be her response. She couldn’t graduate from the Pilot Academy without passing her tests; she couldn’t pass her tests with a defective piloting implant; no one would believe her implant was defective. She couldn’t wash out of the Academy program, not with a piloting implant worth a small fortune in her head; it was impossible to remove while she was alive, and her death would render it inoperable. She could never earn back the implant’s cost without a piloting job. And she couldn’t get a piloting job without graduating.

Unless she convinced Traders Consortium Defense to bend the rules and let her in without test scores. "I want to do something with my life other than repeat my last year of classes again. I’m sure people have joined for much worse reasons."

When the recording picked up once more, Natalie looked down rather than speak for several breaths, reluctant. You could always come home.

Not reluctant about the offer itself, but reluctant to make it explicit. It had been silently threaded through every interaction in the years since Chloe’s abysmal test scores had first prevented her graduation. They both knew it wouldn’t work, but all right, she’d make the arguments against it explicit too.

The Traders Consortium can’t hold the family accountable for my personal debt for my piloting implant, but if they know you’re harboring me they could certainly blacklist you in all the Zone markets. So instead of earning a good living and sending back enough money so we can irrigate more land and expand, I’d be responsible for ruining you all!

Money was what the Free Trade Zone was all about, after all. Centuries of conflict between the planetary empires on either side had rendered the planets that composed the Zone nearly unhabitable; a few generations ago, the empires had finally signed a ceasefire and officially abandoned the Zone to act as something of a demilitarized buffer. Those with nowhere else to go had showed up to scratch a living out of the remains, and the Traders Consortium had been formed, first, to sell what hard-working Zone Tailings folk like Chloe’s family produced back to the empires, and eventually, and more lucratively, to take a middle-trader cut on trade between the empires. The Traders Consortium was the nearest thing the Zone had to a centralized authority, but it only legislated and enforced matters concerning trade.

In other words, money.

Chloe grimaced. "And I suppose I could hide out so they don’t know you’re harboring me, but then I really couldn’t contribute anything to the farm except another mouth to feed."

Natalie gave a wry smile when the recording moved again. Now you’ve no doubt laid out all the reasons I’m wrong. But remember, I love you. We love you, whatever you do.

Chloe interleaved love of her own, ended the recording, and took a deep breath. She was doing something. She was intelligent; she would be an asset to CoDef or anyone else, whatever her undetectably defective piloting implant did to her test scores. If nothing else, she would go into this interview fully confident.

Chloe passed a clump of second-years on the way to the conference room where CoDef was holding its interviews, their volume and joyfully tripping rhythm indicating that subject to their final scores, they had their job offers. She kept her face blank as they noticed her and pity sparked up in their expressions. It was better than bullying, she supposed, but that didn’t make her any less fucking sick of it. So far, in both her repeated years, the incoming class moving up to the station after the first year planetside had started out confused, shifted to suspicion or judgment—what was her angle? Was she that lazy?—and then settled into something nearer respect when they saw the scores others could get when she used the time she saved by cutting repeated classes to tutor them. And now they were moving on to exciting job opportunities and it was pity on their faces.

Frustratingly, at the moment, she actually looked like she belonged among them; it had been years since that was true. The patch on the shoulder of her uniform was a new one, rather than the one she’d defaced to read "Second Year × 23." And though the age of those entering the Pilot Academy was somewhat capped by an increasing incidence after middle age of poor reactions to the addition of a specialized piloting implant on top of the com implants everyone got as a child, the students’ ages otherwise ranged widely. She was younger than several in this year’s graduating class.

But still, she stood out, whether because of her jaded air or bone-deep exhaustion with her situation.

She stopped beside a wall display set to act like a window toward the planet below them and resisted touching her tight bun as her eyes traced the line of night and day over dark ocean and swirled gray cloud. At this point, she’d only make her hair messier, not smoother.

At her appointment time to the minute, she activated the door chime and heard a come in from inside. Two CoDef representatives waited for her, their uniforms crisp. The woman was seated at a small conference table, directly across from the empty chair clearly intended for the interviewee, while the man was seated farther along the interviewers’ side, a deferential angle to his body language suggesting he was the junior of the two. Chloe matched them to the names listed in the interview announcement: Hanoi Juliette and Damascus Lomatium, the former very much a Libertad Fransa name and the latter very much a Pax Romana one, though they both used the Zone ordering of personal and family names. The two could have been born in the Zone to families from the respective empires, she supposed, but the kind of circumstances that drove someone to move to the Zone tended to also result in enthusiastic adoption of new family names, if not for themselves, definitely for their children. So these two had probably come as adults. She wondered if their pairing for this task was purposeful, to remind CoDef applicants that even if they’d also fled to the Zone as adults, they needed to put aside any enmity toward those from the opposite empire.

Chloe, on the other hand, mistrusted both empires equally but was willing to at least grant a clean slate to anyone willing to completely leave behind home and family for the Zone. Still, she couldn’t help but idly compare each representative against their respective cultural stereotype. The Libertad Fransa were known as the rebels, the firebrands, living on the edge with revolutionary art and laughing violence. Juliette had slick, black hair cut short and eyes with epicanthic folds, no sign of violence, laughing or otherwise, in her calm, centered posture. The Pax Romana were known as crowded-city dwellers, crushed by bureaucracy but clinging to pride in their ancient ancestors and an imagined technological superiority. Lomatium did look plenty urban, his brown skin showing no hint of weathering. He’d also stopped his beard growth at a Pax Romana–fashionable black scruff along his jaw that probably got him called too imperial to know shit stinks behind his back in the Zone, like he was too unfamiliar with honest grime to know he needed to wash up.

Chloe nodded to them both. Franklin Chloe, she said and waited for an invitation to sit.

Which she did not receive. The two traded a look. I thought we were going to cancel this interview, Lomatium murmured.

It’s literally impossible to score this low; a piloting implant’s automated functions won’t allow it. Unless she was trying to throw the tests on purpose. Juliette speared Chloe with an assessing gaze. So I was curious how she’d explain it.

A chance to explain was definitely better than nothing.