Terra Firma

By Peter Banks

After her father is accused of involvement in a terrorist plot on the moon, reporter Lila Cox uncovers a major threat to the future of the human race. Under government surveillance, she must follow a trail, which leads to the highest levels of government and the private sector. Can she get the story before they get her?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Banks
• Release date: Sep 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9798215222461

Peter Banks

Peter Banks is a writer living in Brazil

Book preview

Terra Firma

By Peter S Banks

Book 2 of The Three Spheres Trilogy

Copyright © 2020 Peter S Banks

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

For Raquel, Tiago, Marilia, and mom.

Chapter 1

The night before I learned my father might be a mass murderer, I was working on a profile, sitting in front of my link-up. I held an enhancement drive in my hand. Occasionally, I put it up to the chip in my neck to provide myself with a dose of calm. It was a bad habit I’d picked up long ago, when I first made the transition into my artificial body. What I needed was a pluck to help me relax and focus, a single dose to ease my anxiety. I had an article to finish, and I needed a spark to complete it. I’d had hundreds, if not thousands of deadlines, and I’d met all of them. So, I had good reason to be confident.

But that night I just couldn’t concentrate.

Three hours to go and still another 400 well-crafted words were required of me before I could send the story to my editor. Without question, I could slam together something that sounded nice, but my goal was to put together a good story. Unconsciously, my foot kicked the toolbox under my desk, still there from when I had installed the new link-up system.

A night without a moment of rest at the Source, the central location where all of us who had chosen ever-lasting life could get a respite from our world, lay ahead of me. Of that I was sure. Not that I minded missing Source time. I’d grown accustomed to living with limited rest. There was something artificial, always had been, about connecting to a centralized hub for peace and serenity.

A lack of Source time wasn’t why I was having trouble concentrating, however.

Lying on my bed was a man who would not shut his mouth. It was like someone paid him to keep up his inane chatter. Next to him was our consort for the evening, a young woman, a throwaway, whose name I hadn’t picked up on. She was tall and thin and had short dark hair. Her brown eyes focused on the ceiling. But it wasn’t the throwaway that was distracting. Her usefulness had come to an end more than an hour ago.

It was Neil, my sometimes-male-companion, who was bothering me. He was a handsome man, of course, with dark hair that he allowed to grow just to his shoulders. His Transfer was bony-shouldered and had a narrow waist, which he said he’d chosen because at one time he’d been seventy-five-pounds overweight. His choice of Transfer was meant to be the opposite of everything he’d once been.

To Neil, speaking about his passion was anything but inane. To the average person, however, his ongoing lecture would have caused complaints of aural assault. He chirped about the conference he’d put on over the weekend where he and his fellow domino enthusiasts had gathered to build new structures, talked about the art of building domino configurations, and looked at graphic recreations of some of the greatest domino structures ever imagined.

Yes, dominos.

Everlasting life had done nothing to rid the world of people with very odd hobbies. If you had told me ten years earlier that this would be my existence, that I would be sleeping with a man who devoted himself to domino culture, I would have said you were a fool.

And yet…

Lila, it’s hard for me to oversell that lecture, Neil said, concluding his five-minute oration on an expert in using levers in domino structures. The throwaway shifted in bed, turned away from Neil, as though it were sentient enough to find his words sleep-inducing.

Could he not tell that I was working?

Neil followed his statement with another attempt to emphasize the importance of domino levers. Hearing his grating voice, words at the edges of my senses, I struggled to order my notes. I was concerned that this piece didn’t have the kind of arc readers expected and which my editor demanded. I didn’t want to have to do a total rewrite.

As stories went, it wasn’t much. A puff piece, really. A profile. Of the most rich and famous man on the Three Spheres, Quincy Laslow Senior. This man had made his fortune, likely the largest in the Three Spheres, through the suffering of others, and though it had been difficult for me to take his peculiar self-righteousness, I had followed him around as a doting profiler must do.

My recent profile on General Brian McHenry, candidate for terrestrial president, had put me in the spotlight. My boss said I had a knack for them, and thus I had been assigned another.

I preferred writing juicy stories about the Green Revolution and their complicated battle against the wrongs that had been perpetrated against so many of our citizens on the Three Spheres, but there were occasions when the powers that be in the editorial hierarchy required an ode to those in positions of leadership. Indeed, they understood that to help people understand the times they inhabited, they needed insight into the people who sought to be their leaders. Since the owners of our conglomerate, Victor Newberry and his wife Olga Dahlgren, had died recently under unusual circumstances, our editorial staff had doubled down on the idea that we should focus our efforts on presenting a comprehensive view of our worlds, including people who wanted power. And so it was with this profile of Quincy Laslow Senior, who was, unsurprisingly, as unsympathetic to the concerns of Green Revolution partisans as he could be.

Next convention is in October, Neil said suddenly, his voice eager. A small gurgle erupted from the throat of the throwaway.

That’s nice, I said. I felt an urge to get up, put my hands around his throat, and wring it until he was unable to speak another word.

Maybe you could come with me this time? he asked, as though he were a pre-teen asking a girl out on a first date.

I pretended I didn’t hear him. It was a common tactic. Sometimes I tried to pass my non-responses to his absurd questions as a problem with my Transfer. It needed updating, I’d say. Probably had a bug preventing me from hearing everything.

Neil was my neighbor and occasionally we shared a bed. But we weren’t equals. If our relationship was a seesaw, I was the one with my feet on the ground, watching him kick his legs about. At any moment, I could bring his whole world crashing down.

After almost forty years of wearing me down with convenient stops by the house, unwanted presents, and an uncanny ability to take care of chores around my house, I’d hopped into bed with him in a moment of weakness. I knew immediately that it was a mistake. And sometimes mistakes have lasting consequences. Especially in the Transfer age.

It’s not easy to sleep with your neighbor who is emotionally fragile and will live forever and then break off the relationship. If my temperament had lent itself toward cruelty or watching others suffer, I probably would have cut him loose a long time ago. But I wasn’t, so I hadn’t.

There we were, ten years later, still doing friends with occasional bed-time benefits. I don’t want to convey that I didn’t like Neil. He was a very sweet man and a very generous man, and he was very nice to me. But his flapping tongue and sleep-inducing hobby were, particularly when I had an ungodly amount of work to do, irritating.

So … what do you think? Should I…?

I put up a warning finger to let him know I was in the middle of something important and I didn’t appreciate him speaking. He didn’t follow up with a response. Didn’t push me to provide him with an answer. Neil was aware of my limits, and that if he annoyed me I’d easily go a week or two without seeing him. I’d done it in the past and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. It was mean, I admit, but I really did need a few hours of silence to put the finishing touches on my piece.

I sat back in my chair and drew a long breath. I needed to end this profile, and I needed to do so in a way that made this trillionaire, this man who was so unlike any other, appear reasonable and responsible, which was exactly what the man had tried to convey to me while at the same time presenting the policy positions to which he adhered, which made him appear anything but reasonable.

I was stuck.

In the moment of silence that Neil had graced me with, I couldn’t put together coherent thoughts. There was no reason for me to be unable to think of an ending. I’d been doing this job for a long time. But still, moments of intense brain freeze always seemed to catch me at the most inopportune times.

Peanut Butter, my tabby, rubbed up against my leg. I bent down and drew my fingers through his short, dark fur. A bit of purring erupted from his throat. He hopped up onto my lap, where he moved until he found a comfortable position, nestled under my elbows.

The room was dark and warm and I allowed myself to become fully aware of where I was. The smell of sex was in the air. I cast my eyes to the wooden bookshelves that lined my walls, at the spines of the hundreds of books I’d purchased myself and those my father had left me. This should have been the perfect, relaxing environment in which to spin a creative ending.

I closed my eyes and gave myself a dose from my drive, hoping to drift into the final arc of my article.

My link-up buzzed at that moment, as though the universe knew I was trying to become one with it and wanted to disabuse me of the notion that I could do so. I thought about ignoring the notification. I really did. Not that it would have made any difference in the long run.

After several seconds of buzzing, and another few seconds of Neil clearing his throat, indicating he was annoyed I wasn’t doing something about my humming link-up, I looked at the notification.

The words on the screen read: Lunar Laslow Building Endures Terrorist Attack. Sectors Closed.

Chapter 2

More than five hundred years ago, life on Earth changed. We discovered the reality of the soul. And with that discovery came the scientific pursuit of sustaining life indefinitely. The creation of the Transfer, a temporary human body that could be shed for another, came soon after.

While the price for such bodies was modest, there were two major qualifications. The first was that the individual had to accept the paid advertisements of the world’s largest corporations at whatever time those corporations wanted to show them. The second was the connection to what leaders and scientists called the Source, a place where humanity could come together to both gather strength and connect in a way that had not been previously possible.

We were each able to create our own safe space at the Source, a virtual paradise that allowed us to peacefully connect with all positive human energy. Or so we were told. I had chosen the Outer Banks of North Carolina for myself, a place that I had gone nearly every summer with my parents when I was a child. And it was that innocence that I absorbed nearly every night when I hooked myself up to my Source machine and allowed my consciousness to connect with digital heaven.

As the realization came that reproduction and everlasting life didn’t mix, and resources began to dwindle, our species began to explore off-planet options. The moon and Mars became outposts for humanity, but primarily for those who were no longer wanted or needed on Earth. This was not written down anywhere, had not become a specific policy prescription, but most understood that the efforts to entice people to move away from Earth were targeted at those with the least resources.

Out of the growing inequality came a new movement: the Green Revolution. It had its core tenets that many people agreed with, including basic income and resource sharing standards across the Spheres, but at a certain point after the deaths of the founders of the organization, the GR as it was sometimes called, began to insist through violence.

Even though there were plenty of members who detested this violence, it became branded a terrorist organization. From there it wasn’t difficult to blame nearly every act of terror on the organization, because it often claimed responsibility, though it was impossible to pinpoint, according to investigators, who the individual perpetrators were. The leadership had disintegrated. The values of the organization seemed to be compromised.

The Green Revolution’s funding supposedly came from two major vices. With new bodies and new technology came new drugs, enhancements people called them. The first one, Love, went on to be banned because of its addictive qualities, though there remained a significant underground fan club, which many in law enforcement and intelligence claimed was fed by the Green Revolution. Others remained quite legal and brought the same level of anti-anxiety remediation that the pills of the 20th and 21st century had always promised. I myself enjoyed an occasional enhancement or two, though I never thought of myself as an aficionado.

Our vices remained sexual as well. A trade grew among those who wanted male or female companionship for an evening or two, and the harvesting of traded-in or used Transfers, or throwaways, as they came to be called, grew into this sex trade, which some speculated helped fund the Green Revolution as well, while others, like myself, chose not to think about where our money might be going.

In the twenty-minutes it took me to slip into and out of a shower and put on the gray pants and white shirt of a woman in the professional world, I was exposed to more than half a dozen commercials, including for toilet paper, coffee enhancements, and shampoo. Each of those things I needed desperately and, after I put my clothes on, I placed my orders with my servicer, Ronnie.

My take on fashion was not what it had once been, so I tended to keep my clothing choices as simple as possible. I wasn’t flamboyant like some others who had taken everlasting life as a signal to wear the most outrageous outfits possible. I didn’t have time to think too much about fashion. What I normally did when Neil spent the night, and what I was doing that early morning, was focusing on my urgent need to get out of the house, away from him, and out to work.

Oh my, he’d said as I’d rushed into the bathroom, I’ll put on a pot of coffee.

I couldn’t help but flog myself for thinking badly of him. It was truly a horrible way to perceive another human being, even if that human being could be as annoying as a cold sore.

I didn’t need to leave then. I could have done my work as I had been, ignored this breaking news. I didn’t technically need to go into the office, but I was so annoyed with his inability to let me work, if I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to get away from him I knew I would come to resent him more than I already did.

God bless him, though. Neil followed through and brewed a pot of coffee and handed me a mug as I got to the bottom of the stairs. He looked at me with the eyes of a desperate lover, someone who knew he could lose me with a bad pot of coffee. I smiled at him, took a sip, and winced at the coffee’s weakness.

Thanks for this, I said, knowing I’d have to get myself another cup when I got into the office. If he hadn’t been right next to me, I probably would have poured the entire cup down the drain. I held my breath, downed the coffee, pecked Neil on the lips, and scratched Peanut Butter’s furry head. Oh, and don’t forget to take the throwaway back. I don’t want to pay a late fee.

Will do, he said. Call when you get home, Neil said. His voice went up several octaves like he wasn’t sure I was going to do it.

Lock up when you leave, I said.

He smiled that ever hopeful, anxious smile, like he was still waiting for me to respond to his request to go with him to his domino festival. But that wasn’t all he was thinking about, I knew. Since I’d given him the keys to my house, he’d been thinking about