Praeceps

By Albert Aykler

On Praeceps there is no crime because there are no laws.

 

Every neon-stained gray dawn reveals the body of another 'impossible person' floating face down in the drainage canals. A group called The Syndicate controls Precip City with a brutal security force made up of off-world mercenaries. Under their watch, even possible people have no rights or recourse.

 

Sancho Panza Borkman takes a job working for the Galactic Consortium to help bring justice to his home world, but when the Consortium's machine mind Garde T-31 arrives to validate the need for GC-administered rule of law, anomalies begin to occur. Rain stops falling, Praeceps goes silent, and constructed minds die.

Panza must find the source of the anomalies and stop it before T-31 is destroyed and the galaxy's best hope for justice along with it.

 

Praeceps is a thrilling sci-fi mystery that will please fans of The Expanse, Iain M. Banks, and the Wayfarer series. Join Panza on his journey and buy it today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Love & Wander Books
• Release date: Aug 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781954497030

Albert Aykler

Albert Aykler lives and writes as a nomad whose remaining connections with the country of his birth are largely digital in nature. Many of his works began as he dwelt in obscure seclusion in the American Northwest while recovering from a period of corporate servitude not unlike that of the characters attempting to survive the horrors and indignities of world of the Silvercrest Experiment Series.

Book preview

CHAPTER

ONE

My love affair with T-31 begins like all great love affairs, with an argument. Well, two arguments.

One night last year (Praeceps 392 / GC 2714), I walked across bridge eight to our dingy part of Manager’s Row West. Pop started in on me almost as soon as the door opened. You’re late. Again.

Sorry.

No overtime, I’ll bet.

There is no overtime on Praeceps. He knows this. He knew it before I knew it.

My boss Rubii had insisted I stay late to retrain a dozen dockside census bots that had stopped doing what census bots do (mostly methodically mundane math) in the wake of a quantum anomaly a couple of days earlier. My ‘answering dumb questions and correcting misunderstandings’ brain cells were fried. I tried changing the subject. Did the housebot get your dinner sorted?

Why does it have to be you? Tell me that, huh? Why my son? Why Panza Borkman?

I gave him my standard answer. Because I can do it, Pops. I tried and failed to toss my hat onto the bent 26 th century antique drying rack next to the door. I left it on the floor, fully intending to pick it up once I squeezed out of my slicker suit.

"I know you can do it. I want to know why they would hire you, of all people?" Either he can’t remember that I don’t want to talk about this stuff, or he pretends not to remember because he never likes my answers. Whatever the reason, he has yet to greet me with a ‘Hey, how are you?’ Always right to the fight.

Tell me, Pop, do you hate the job or that I am the one doing it? I started peeling my body free from my suit.

Neither. Or both. Doesn’t matter what I hate. Or what I like. It’s suspicious.

I’m a Data Validation Technician, which is a wordy way of saying a meatspace reality checker in JurTech, Garde T-31’s legally required human support division.

T-31 knows a lot, thinks at quantum speeds, and has the authority to order just about anything it wants done in order to make an accurate census and resource assessment of Praeceps, but it can’t gather data on its own. For that, it relies on hordes of bots, drones, and sensors. But they don’t smell, think (much), or most importantly, feel.

And they definitely don’t understand Praecepeans. Like all humans in the Galactic Consortium, we can trace our DNA to Earthlings and Martians, but we have our own ways of doing things.

That’s where the DVTechs come in. We’re the just-smart-enough and just-local-enough squad T-31 needs for debugging data collection anomalies in order to know what’s really going on in Precip City. We live and breathe in the confusing muck of reality. We scurry, wade, swim, sink, sniff, and scramble through the city to address oddities that the dumb sensors, drones, and bots produce in T-31’s version of reality. We poke, prod, fiddle, shake, reset, and retrieve devices day in and day out. And we don’t keep regular hours.

To top that off, T-31 makes us dress funny. We wear special issue slicker suits. They look like trench coats made of tarnishing silver, combined with black wetsuits and silver boots. A strange getup to anyone from a planet where rain comes and goes and kids look for patterns in the clouds instead of random patches of open sky that sporadically break through. It keeps me dry, but it’s a hassle getting in and out of it.

And my suit gave me a worse-than-usual fight that night, so maybe that’s why I let Pop get to me. Or maybe I always let him get to me. Suspicious, Pop? What’s not suspicious to you?

Look, the census is good. It’s overdue. But you don’t… well… He watched me struggling to remove the slicker, then said, You don’t fit that suit.

Can we not do the Fatboy thing tonight? He keeps a picture of me in the rotation of images running next to his comfy chair. In it, I’m a chubby twelve-year-old making house calls at his side. To him, I’m always the kid all his clients called Fatboy.

No, not your body. Though you oughta ease up on the kelp crisps. No, that machine has an agenda. A big subroutine. Quantum entities don’t think like regular people. It hired you for its own reasons.

Seems obvious enough that a sentient mind would have reasons, right? But it’s the beginning of a decades-old rant he and my mom loved to riff on.

Quantum entities won’t save humanity. They can, but they won’t. They’re a contemporary manifestation of ancient systemic oppression and institutionalized impoverishment. Machines versus humans. Humans are destined to be slaves to machines.

You know the story. But that Old Modernist paranoia wasn’t all talk for my parents. My mother gave her life in something Pop calls a political action on Mars. The way he tells it, she died fighting against the dominance of sentient machines.

The way the official GC record has it, Dr. Delphinia Hue, Ph.D., wife of Dr. Tunji Borkman, mother of Sancho Panza Borkman, suffered a stress-induced cardiac arrhythmia. Help did not arrive in time to resuscitate her. Temperatures on Mars prevented emergency cold bio-suspension prior to transport.

After Ma died, Pops spent his life working against the system in his own way. He moved us to the most lawless planet in the GC to provide medical assistance to anyone who said they were sick. No proof of identity, payment, or machine diagnosis required. On any other planet in the GC, that would be illegal.

I learned a lot from my parents, but first and foremost, I learned that every do-gooder comes with an ego. Human or machine.

"Hey Pop, did you ever consider that maybe T-31 isn’t something you can figure out with your outdated political critique of the Galactic Consortium? It’s a lot smarter than—"

Bah. If that thing’s so smart, why doesn’t it know possible from impossible?

Impossible people had filled the newsfeeds before T-31’s arrival and now they hardly reported anything else. Every death of an impossible person was a chance for the Syndicate and constructed mind critics like Pop to show how useless T-31 and the census were.

You know what? You’re not pulling me into this tonight. I’m too tired.

Into what?

Into me defending a machine I don’t even like, so you can rant at me.

Oh, you like it all right. Up came his gnarled, shaky fingers pointing at my nose from across the room. You like it more than most. You just don’t want to admit it.

He was right. I refused to admit to him that I liked working for something halfway intelligent. I didn’t much care for my boss, Rubii, and I didn’t know whether I liked T-31 itself at that point, but I liked the working conditions. The job comes with interesting problems. Sometimes, anyway.

What I wanted to tell him was that working on the JurTech Census kept me from tearing my eyes out of their sockets every time I went out and saw where we lived. But I knew he wanted me to say that for a long time, so I didn’t. I couldn’t give in to him.

Instead, I told him, I like that it pays our bills.

Lots of things pay the bills. Most of them aren’t quantum minds whose sole purpose is to govern the galaxy according to principles they refuse to express in words the everyday person can understand.

So, I should have taken that admin post back on Europa and left you here to fend for yourself? I had finally freed myself from the top of the slicker suit.

Don’t try to bullshit me that you came back here for my benefit. And it certainly wasn’t for the Rain City weather. Rain City is what old timers call Precip City. Hell, your first two months back, you never got wet. And that’s a way of saying I never went outside.

I stopped fighting my suit and raised both hands. Okay. Okay. Let’s—

You moped around here hiding from your failures back in the so-called Central Consortium. Pop plopped himself down into his worn therapeutic recliner as though he couldn’t go on, but that only meant he had just started. You came back to escape reality, same as ever. You don’t stand for anything but getting by? How you are your mother’s son is something I can’t process—

That’s it. We’re done. Have a good night, Pop. As soon as he mentions Ma, I have to cut out or I’ll do or say something I’ll regret later.

I grabbed my hat, then stopped halfway out the door. One more thing, Pops, Ma died running away from you, not me. Oops. That’s the kind of thing I regret almost as soon as it leaves my mouth. I would have slammed the door if it wasn’t an automated slider.

The truth about Ma is messy. According to Pop, becoming as bad a mother as her own terrified her. By the time I was seven, her fears were becoming reality. When she took off to protest on Mars, Ma she was running away from pouring nightmares into my skull in the form of quantum mind apocalypse bedtime stories. That’s what he remembers. I remember her early morning high volume ‘discussions’ with Pop about the ethics of living anywhere in the GC (he wanted out, she needed to stay and fight).

Pops is the only family I have. I will do whatever it takes to keep him alive and kicking for as long as possible. But I can’t always put up with his anger at the galaxy. Some nights, I need a break. Most nights.

When that happens, I take a ride on Precip City Central, the city’s longest maglev line. I ride to ride. No particular destination in mind. Just to find some peace and maybe some sleep. When I wake up, I go home or back to work, whichever is closest.

I need my own place, but Pop needs me. Whether or not he admits it, a semi-sentient housebot is not enough for a guy at his age to make it on his own. Now, it was coming to a head though. I needed to get out and live on my own.

After I left Pop that night, I pulled my slicker suit back up and headed to Station Eight to jump the first train to pull in. It was east bound and nearly empty. I slid into one of the