Evening of May 14, 2440
By the time Priya Shen caught Matthew Marmaduke, the south lawn of the homestead had become a roaming interview floor.
More than a thousand members of the press were scattered through nearly 15 acres of pavilions, bars, food stations and open lawn, mixed in with local officials, business leaders and an increasingly recognizable collection of V’ren officers. Camera crews hunted moving targets. Reporters traded places without admitting they were waiting in line. Across the road, the Pleasure Park was brightening into evening.
The V’ren captains would not arrive until morning.
Nobody seemed inclined to wait for them.
“Lord Marmaduke, Priya Shen, Wired.”
Matt turned and grinned.
“I know who you are.”
That stopped her for half a beat.
“Longtime fan. You’re a tech girlie who can write and doesn’t have to lean on her pretty face.”
Priya gave him a look that suggested she was deciding whether to be flattered or charge him interest.
Matt kept going.
“I wish you were sticking around long enough to meet T’mari. I gave her some of your work. She hopes you ask for an interview.”
That changed the look.
“You gave an alien engineer my work?”
“Communications officer, engineer, pilot, professional pain in my ass. She contains multitudes.”
“And she wants to talk to me?”
“She does now.”
A server passed with drinks. Matt intercepted a red tiki mug and handed it to Priya.
“Skip the wine. Try this.”
She took a cautious sip.
Then a larger one.
“That is out of this world.”
Matt reached for a samosa.
“Phrase hits different now, doesn’t it?”
“It really does.”
Priya looked down at the mug.
“What is this?”
“Something you should finish before asking what’s in it.”
“That is never reassuring.”
“Yet you’re still drinking it.”
She was.
“So here’s my question,” Priya said. “From the outside, the Freehold looks like it runs on next-generation systems. Grids that don’t brown out. Farms that behave like somebody actually maintains them. Logistics that seem suspiciously competent.”
“I resent the implication.”
“You should. Competence is terrible for your brand.”
Matt laughed.
“And now you have alien hardware, alien engineers and alien scientists moving around your territory. There are already people claiming half of what we’re seeing is reverse-engineered V’ren technology.”
“Of course there are.”
“And other people say nothing fundamental changed, you just got a million new partners and a very dramatic hardware upgrade.”
“That’s closer.”
“So which is it? Post-Collapse innovation or post-contact adaptation?”
Matt considered that.
“One of these days, I’ll even get the trains to run on time.”
Priya laughed.
“I walked into that.”
“You really did.”
Another group passed behind them, briefly swallowing the conversation in noise. A V’ren woman stopped to speak with a local official several yards away. Two photographers immediately redirected toward her.
Matt waited for the traffic to clear.
“We have reliable power because nobody else wanted to invest in the grid when it mattered. By the 2080s, the locals had figured out that waiting for somebody to save them was a losing strategy.”
“So the Freehold bought it?”
“My predecessors started buying pieces. Hydro dams. Substations. Fuel reserves. Distribution assets. Anything useful that somebody else had decided wasn’t worth maintaining.”
“And when the larger system failed?”
“They wanted us to repair it at our expense and hand it back.”
Priya smiled.
“You said no.”
“My many-times-over great-grandfather said no.”
“Politely?”
“I’ve read the transcript.”
Matt took another bite of the samosa.
“His profanity was a thing of beauty.”
Priya lifted the tiki mug.
“To infrastructure policy.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“We’re still talking old human systems, though.”
“We are.”
“What changed after May 4?”
“Access.”
“To V’ren hardware?”
“To V’ren people.”
That answer made Priya stop writing for a second.
Matt noticed.
“Hardware is easy to fetishize,” he said. “People see something they can’t build and assume the miracle is the machine.”
“And you don’t?”
“The machine matters. The person who knows why it works matters more.”
Priya nodded.
“So you’re not reverse-engineering.”
“We’re forming partnerships.”
“Distinction without a difference?”
“Big difference.”
“How?”
“If I take apart your computer and copy it, I’ve reverse-engineered your computer. If you sit down with me and show me how you designed it, why you designed it that way, what failed during development, what not to touch and what you wish you’d done differently, now we’re collaborating.”
“That assumes trust.”
“Exactly.”
Priya smiled.
“There’s the word.”
“You expected another one?”
“I expected logistics.”
“You’ll get logistics.”
“I knew I liked you.”
Matt raised an eyebrow.
“That sounded dangerously reciprocal.”
“Don’t get excited.”
“Too late.”
She laughed and took another drink.
“What’s the most important technology they’ve brought?”
“The neural interface. Not even close.”
“Not propulsion?”
“No.”
“Power generation?”
“No.”
“Materials?”
“No.”
“FTL communications?”
“Important. Still no.”
“So the machine that hurts people while teaching them things.”
“That would be the one.”
Priya studied him.
“You used it.”
“Several times.”
“How much V’ren do you actually speak?”
“About as well as I speak Spanish or Bisaya now.”
“That fast?”
“I grew up around languages. Dutch too. I had Korean and Japanese to varying degrees and improved both over the years. You hear all of those around here.”
“But V’ren took less than a week.”
“With the interface.”
Priya glanced toward the V’ren guests circulating through the reception.
“That changes education.”
“It changes everything.”
“That sounds like exactly the kind of technology somebody is going to try to monopolize.”
“Which brings us back to logistics.”
“There it is.”
Matt held out his empty glass toward a passing server. Priya did the same with the tiki mug.
“You’re getting another?”
“I’m conducting research.”
“Good answer.”
The server replaced both drinks.
“There are three problems,” Matt said. “First, machines. There aren’t enough of them. Second, technicians. There aren’t enough of them either. Third, people.”
“Human tolerance.”
“Exactly.”
“How bad?”
“Think snorting aquarium gravel through an air compressor.”
Priya stared at him.
“That’s going in print.”
“I assumed it would.”
“And people volunteer for this?”
“You probably will.”
She narrowed her eyes.
Matt grinned.
“You, my tech girlie with the electrical engineering background, already know exactly why.”
“Because now I need to know whether you’re exaggerating.”
“There you go.”
“What’s the second problem?”
“Power.”
“V’ren power?”
“Interface power, support systems, conversion losses, everything wrapped around trying to run equipment designed for somebody else’s electrical ecosystem.”
“Base 12.”
Matt pointed at her.
“See? This is why T’mari likes you already.”
Priya smiled despite herself.
“Their mathematics is base 12. Their engineering conventions grew up around it. Control architecture, signal logic, instrumentation, thermal systems, all of it assumes conventions we didn’t.”
“And you’re adapting their equipment to Earth-standard infrastructure.”
“Where I can.”
“That sounds ugly.”
“It gets uglier.”
“How ugly?”
“The sort of ugly where an engineer looks at the documentation, swears for five minutes and then goes looking for another engineer to blame.”
“That is a recognized international standard.”
“I thought Wired might understand.”
“We have institutional expertise.”
Another laugh.
Priya leaned closer, partly because the reception had become louder.
“So are you going to share interface access?”
“Yes.”
“With whom?”
“Eventually? As broadly as practical.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is when practical is the bottleneck.”
“Who gets priority?”
“People doing useful things.”
“That sounds suspiciously Freehold.”
“It should.”
“Doctors?”
“Yes.”
“Engineers?”
“Yes.”
“Teachers?”
“Absolutely.”
“Journalists?”
Matt looked at her.
“Depends on the journalist.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You wanted honesty.”
“I want access.”
“That too.”
She gave him the look again.
He enjoyed it.
“If you’re game, stick around a few days,” Matt said. “I’ll schedule you for a live course.”
Priya stopped.
“Seriously?”
“Hands-on. Course of your choosing.”
“With editorial independence?”
“I don’t get to edit Wired.”
“You’d be amazed how many powerful men need that explained.”
“I’m powerful, not delusional.”
“Debatable.”
“Still flirting?”
“Still interviewing.”
“Good.”
Priya took another sip.
“Any restrictions?”
“No military applications.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m not putting warfighting tactics, weapons systems or orbital targeting protocols directly into human heads.”
“You think somebody would ask?”
“I think somebody already has.”
That wiped the smile from Priya’s face.
Matt’s tone stayed light, but the answer did not.
“We’re already too good at killing each other.”
“So you’ll share the technology, but curate the curriculum.”
“I’ll control what I control.”
“And once it leaves your territory?”
“Then we get to discover whether humans learned anything from the last four hundred years.”
“You don’t sound optimistic.”
“I’m an optimist with contingency plans.”
“That may be the most Missouri sentence I’ve heard all day.”
“Spend another night.”
Priya laughed.
“You mentioned logistics.”
“I promised.”
Matt gestured south, toward nothing Priya could see beyond the pavilions.
“Twenty years ago, I had a partial stake in two freight haulers running south. Memphis to Columbia was maybe a hundred round-trip loads in an entire month.”
“And now?”
“Minimum hundred a day.”
Priya lowered the mug.
“You increased throughput roughly thirtyfold.”
“At minimum.”
“Peak?”
“Three hundred.”
“A day?”
“A day.”
“Loaded south?”
“Both directions. We bring as much north as we take south.”
“That’s not a freight route anymore.”
“No.”
“That’s an artery.”
Matt smiled.
“Now you’re getting it.”
“So when people say the Freehold’s advantage is alien technology…”
“They’re looking at the shiny thing.”
“And the boring thing?”
“Power. Freight. Food. Maintenance. People who answer the phone. Someone noticing the pump sounds wrong before it breaks.”
“That’s your technological thesis?”
“That’s my civilization thesis.”
Priya raised her glass.
“That actually makes me feel better about your willingness to share the interface. Not worse.”
“Good.”
“And yes, I’m taking the course.”
“I knew you would.”
“You were that sure?”
“You’re still drinking something I handed you without knowing what’s in it.”
Priya looked down at the tiki mug.
“That is not evidence of sound judgment.”
“No. Curiosity.”
That one landed.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Around them the reception kept rebuilding itself every few seconds. Interviews formed and broke apart. Servers moved through gaps. A camera operator nearly walked backward into Matt, recovered, apologized and kept filming. Somewhere across the road, the Pleasure Park had become bright enough to color the evening sky.
Priya looked toward the crowd of human and V’ren guests.
“You’ve talked about infrastructure, logistics, education, trust. All the systems stuff.”
“That’s usually why Wired calls.”
“Usually.”
She shifted the recorder in her hand.
“But systems aren’t the same thing as belonging.”
“No.”
“The V’ren brought ceremony, discipline and traditions that have survived for centuries. The Freehold is built out of a different kind of continuity, memory, autonomy, contracts, people who refuse to leave.”
“Fair.”
“These children you’re all suddenly raising together are going to grow up thinking this is normal.”
“I hope so.”
“What do you hope they call what you built?”
Matt looked at her.
“Civilization?”
She waited.
“Family?”
Still nothing.
“Or just the place that didn’t fall apart?”
Matt smiled.
“The old United States fell apart. The Show Me State survived.”
“That’s a slogan.”
“No. It’s an attitude.”
He glanced across the reception.
“Show me what you can do. Then I’ll respect you for where you are in your journey, not just where you came from.”
Priya lowered the recorder slightly.
“I hope these kids remember the good times, the bad times and everything in between,” Matt continued. “Because it’s the journey that matters, not just the destination.”
He took a drink.
“I think too many people forgot that. That’s how you get three presidents in a row shouting ‘Make America Great Again’ when they don’t know how to govern and can’t even be bothered to nominate cabinet heads for agencies they’re tearing apart.”
Priya blinked.
“You know that’s going to get quoted.”
“I know.”
“So what do you hope they call this?”
Matt looked toward the park, the pavilions and the people filling both.
“I hope they grow up, have kids here and call it home.”
Priya let the answer sit for a moment.
Then she lifted the red tiki mug.
“And I still don’t know what’s in this.”
Matt grinned.
“Some mysteries should survive first contact.”
