Artists on the Galactic Tunnel Network (EarthCent Auxiliaries Book 4) Read online

  “Like ‘waah, thump, waah, thump’?” Laura asked facetiously. “Don’t forget it was designed by M793qK, and he showed Flower how to manufacture some kind of magnetic bearings that the Farlings use for heavy equipment. If you could squeeze yourself into the space between the inner and outer cylinders it would run just as smoothly with an adult weight.”

  “Then why don’t you make them for adults who hate exercise equipment?”

  “For one thing, it would have to be six times as deep, and whether we shrank the inner cylinder or expanded the outer, it would end up requiring ten times as much gel. So even if you wanted to spend eight or twelve hours a day lying on your back and spinning around, it would cost a fortune. The extra depth would make the centrifuge take up three or four times as much space, and we barely fit the baby-sized one on the bridge of two-man traders as is.”

  “Since when do you have a problem with exercise or Zero-G?” Georgia asked her husband.

  “I don’t,” Larry said. “I was thinking about the Tunnel Trips rental fleet. Flower is planning on building Sharf two-man traders for commercial rentals, and some of those customers might pay extra to spend the trip in a centrifuge.”

  “It would add a lot to the cost and the ships we’re building are bare-bones fleet rentals,” Laura said. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to look into it, but—”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Flower interrupted. “And I thought we had an agreement that you wouldn’t talk about work issues while you’re here.”

  “Sorry,” Laura said, and shot Georgia and Larry a wink. “I’m glad that Iris could be of help, and I thank you again for the Verlock Sky. I won’t be able to carry it down the ladder while I have the baby, but if you leave it with Don, he’ll bring it home after work.”

  “Thank you so much for coming,” Larry said. “I was beginning to worry I’d have to give up trading until Ji—James was old enough for the exercise equipment. Now we’ll be able to leave for Earth as soon as Flower lets us off at a tunnel entrance.”

  “I’ll give the Verlock Sky to Don, and if you have any problems setting it up, ping me before we leave,” Georgia said. “Thank you again for your help. You wouldn’t believe how nervous I was about this.”

  “Another happy customer,” Laura quipped, and she disappeared through the hatch.

  “Just look at the monitor,” Larry said, pointing at the uniform waveforms. “He’s sleeping like—really well. Heart rate, respiration, REM?”

  “Rapid Eye Movement,” Flower said before Georgia could open her mouth. “Human infants spend much more time dreaming than adults. It helps with brain development.”

  “How can the monitor follow all of that without any wires?”

  “M793qK incorporated a few pieces of Farling medical scanner technology in the design. If you bring up the next screen, you’ll get some digestive tract information, though it probably won’t mean anything to you.”

  “Does the information get logged?” Georgia asked.

  “Logged and transmitted back to me whenever the centrifuge can connect to a free network,” Flower told her. “M793qK insisted on receiving the data as part of his licensing fee.”

  “I don’t remember agreeing to that. Do you, Larry?”

  “I know we had to sign something before the training session, but I didn’t read all of the small print.” He looked towards his ship’s command console as if Flower was resident within it and demanded. “What else did we miss?”

  “You agreed to receive reminders about preventive health checkups for your baby via the ship’s Stryx controller, plus helpful tips about nutrition for the whole family,” the Dollnick AI replied. “There’s also something about participating in a beta trial for a new line of organic baby food that I won’t bore you with until James is weaned, but you can opt-out after four weeks if you aren’t satisfied with the results.”

  Four

  “I want to thank you all for making time for this unscheduled meeting,” Ellen began, speaking directly at her smartphone in its desktop holder. “Our regular monthly meeting is still on for next Tuesday, but we got here ahead of schedule, so I thought I’d give you all the long weekend to think about stories you can pitch.”

  The teleconferencing software shifted to a distraught-looking woman who asked, “Did I just miss ‘Bring your daughter to work day’ again?”

  “The camera is on the wide-angle setting,” Fiona said, reaching for Ellen’s phone and quickly making the change. “Everybody can see me on your feed.”

  “You could have just moved your chair over,” Ellen said, and then looked back at her smartphone. “Sorry for the technical problem. Allow me to introduce Fiona, my new intern. Fiona, say something to your smartphone and the feed will change automatically.”

  “I know how it works,” the teenager said. “Are any of you overseas?”

  “Most of us,” a man replied immediately. “I’m in Australia, but our syndicate covers the whole world. Why do you ask?”

  “I just got an implant and I want to see if it works on Earth languages. Everybody I know speaks English.”

  The video feed switched to a Japanese woman. “We conduct our meetings in English,” she said. “We all speak it, and it’s the language of record for the Galactic Free Press.”

  “They can’t translate articles if you submit them in your native language?” Fiona asked.

  “They could, but word choice has significant meaning for journalists, and submitting in the publication language is the best way to avoid translation errors.”

  “A hundred years ago, you could have heard dozens of different languages just walking around the streets of Manhattan for an afternoon,” the local journalist sitting across the table from Ellen and Fiona ventured. “These days, everybody speaks English.”

  “Then why did you want to know about buying an implant the next time Flower is in orbit?” Ellen asked him.

  “Aliens,” Gerald replied. “With the Wall Street Preserve and the other tourist attractions in Manhattan, you can’t go out at night without tripping over a tail or a tentacle. Most extraterrestrial tourists wear those external translation pendants that allow them to speak the local language, but I’ve heard that the implants shrink the delay to the minimum possible.”

  “It’s true,” a woman with a French accent said, and the video feed shifted to show her sitting in front of a large poster of the Eiffel tower. “We get a lot of tourists here for the museums and the Paris Commune theme park. I can always sell a good alien interview to the local rag, and since I got my implant, it’s much easier to sustain a friendly conversation. It’s not just about getting rid of the delay from the external translation pendants. The implants do a much better job on idioms and emotional coloring.”

  “Does the Galactic Free Press buy implants for all of their regular employees?” a reporter from South America asked.

  “Yes, and they spring for the high-end ones with image capture,” Ellen said. “Most of the pictures you see in the paper are literally taken through the eyes of the reporters.”

  “You can pick up cheap ear-cuff translators as a compromise,” a journalist from Egypt put in. “The downside is that they can’t cancel out the sound of the language that they’re translating, but I’ve picked up a few words of the pronounceable alien languages that way, just from hanging around the pyramids to do reaction stories.”

  “How do the aliens react when they see the pyramids for the first time?”

  “Usually it’s something like, ‘They looked bigger in the holographic travel brochure.’ But I earned enough to buy a new floater by being on the spot when that Verlock mage opened a secret passage into a tomb that nobody had ever discovered.”

  “That was your scoop?” Gerald asked. “The video was awesome.”

  “Took it on my phone,” the Egyptian reporter said proudly. “I have the hands of a robotic surgeon.”

  The conferencing app swapped to video of an older woman clearing her throat. “This is all very intere
sting,” she said, “but I have an editorial meeting in ten minutes I can’t skip and I was hoping to hear what the Galactic Free Press will be buying this month before I have to drop off.”

  “Thank you for reminding me,” Ellen said. “I’ve gotten so comfortable with this conferencing technology that I sometimes forget I’m supposed to be working, plus I only paid for a fifteen-minute slot today. Did everybody see the Grenouthian documentary based on the stories we were reporting a year ago about the theft or sale of important cultural artifacts from Earth’s history?”

  There was a chorus of assents, and a man from the African continent added, “A satellite channel here has been playing it on a continuous loop for the last month. There must be a dozen different versions, though I haven’t sat through enough of them to work out how much of the content is repeating.”

  “The Grenouthians are masters at getting the most out of their footage, and almost every documentary they produce has a much longer companion piece with all of the raw content detailing how the documentary was made,” Ellen explained. “All of you know that the publisher of the Galactic Free Press has close ties with EarthCent. They’re very concerned that the unexpected popularity of Earth culture created by the documentary is giving rise to copycat artistic movements across the tunnel network.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” one of the syndicated journalists asked.

  “Nobody wants to see humanity’s creative community losing their export market when it was just showing signs of life. The paper is interested in any stories about the possible impact of the documentary on cultural events and art shows here on Earth.”

  “That’s a bit vague,” Gerald observed. “Are you worried about aliens showing up at live concerts and pirating recordings, or should we be watching for works of art in exhibitions where the origins of the artist are unclear?”

  “I’m in the L.A. city-state and I’ve been covering the attempts to revive the old movie industry as retro entertainment,” the older woman who had another meeting said. “I have a friend at a small production company that was hired by the Grenouthians to capture 3-D video of the Hollywood reboot efforts for a potential documentary. But that’s an example where the alien interest is helping us.”

  “It would still make an interesting story,” Ellen said. “Write up what you have and I’ll send it along.”

  The conferencing app swapped to the feed of a girl who didn’t look much older than Fiona. “Have you published anything about the proxy shoppers?” she asked.

  “You must be Lena, I recognize you from your Swiss bond interview for the Children’s News Network,” Ellen said. “I heard you were doing some freelance work for us but I didn’t know you had joined the syndicate. What are proxy shoppers?”

  “I only know about them myself because I have friends who have taken leaves from university in the last couple weeks to do it,” Lena said. “It seemed a bit fishy so I started looking into it, but with two-thirds of humanity living somewhere other than Earth, I didn’t expect the trail to lead to aliens. Now I’m wondering if it’s related to what you’re talking about with the documentary sparking demand for Earth culture.”

  “You have friends getting paid to shop?” Fiona asked incredulously. “Where do I sign up? What kind of stuff are they getting paid to buy?”

  “That’s just it,” Lena said. “If they were filling shopping lists with local delicacies or native-language books, the kind of things you could imagine an expatriate wanting, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But my friends are getting paid to go to festivals and street fairs to buy works from a particular category of artists or artisans based on their own taste. That’s why the job is so popular.”

  “And now you think the money may be coming from aliens?” Ellen asked.

  “I just started looking into the agency that’s been hiring proxy shoppers on university campuses. It’s not a publicly listed corporation, and the recruiters either don’t know or won’t say who’s behind it all.”

  “Where do they send the stuff they buy?”

  “That was my next thought, and it all gets shipped to the closer of the two elevator stalks for repackaging. I’m coming into New York for a concert tonight, so I’ll head out to the Elevator Transit Authority tomorrow and see what I can find out.”

  “That’s where we are, so let me know if you need local support,” Ellen said. She tapped the screen of her phone to regain priority when somebody else began to speak. “Sorry to interrupt, but I want to make sure I cover the other issues involved before we get carried away with specifics. Along with the economic impact, my publisher is also concerned about the possibility of backwash.”

  “You mean EarthCent is worried about human-derivative alien art returning to Earth and diluting our culture?” a journalist from the Sao Paulo city-state asked.

  “You can add that to the list, but EarthCent’s intelligence people are a little more paranoid than that. What scares them is that aliens will crack the code of how art influences people and then use it to manipulate our public opinion.”

  “If they’re going to start worrying about that, I’ve been working on a story about the Ladies in Waiting,” a reporter from India said. “The group started here a few years ago, and there are already over ten million members, plus they’re opening new chapters abroad every day.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with—what are they?” Ellen asked.

  “It began as a sort of fan club for dramas, but it’s turned into a movement to adapt the Vergallian form of government for Earth.”

  “Has anybody else heard of the Ladies in Waiting?” The smartphone screen split into quarters, then eighths, then sixteenths, as that many journalists all tried to talk at the same time. Eventually, Ellen gave up waiting for the software to resolve on a single speaker and tapped the screen again to regain focus. “So it sounds like a popular movement and something definitely worth reporting on, uh, I’m afraid I don’t recognize you.”

  “Aanya,” the woman replied.

  “With two A’s?” Ellen asked suspiciously.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s a Hindi name meaning ‘different’ or ‘unique,’” Aanya said. “I’m not a Vergallian wannabe, though my name didn’t hurt any when I signed up with the local Ladies in Waiting chapter to get access to their chat group. I haven’t worked out all of the major players yet, but they seem to be moving towards a schism.”

  “Over which drama is the best?”

  Aanya laughed. “Between the women who want to elect queens from Earth and the women who want to invite Vergallian princesses to come rule us.”

  “Then it’s already serious,” Ellen said. “Have you published any reporting on this?”

  “I wrote a piece for the Bollywood Observer, but it’s one of those things that everybody already knows about so it’s not really news.”

  “Send me what you have. Even though it’s not directly related to the Grenouthian documentary, it’s a good example of the sort of thing that worries the higher-ups.”

  “When you said backwash before, I immediately thought of something unpleasant flowing the wrong direction, like if alien versions of our art and music started polluting the creative scene here on Earth,” Lena said, and the video feed swapped back to the young journalist. “I’ve been covering bands ever since my student newspaper days on the teacher bot network, and all of the musicians I’ve ever interviewed talk about their influences.”

  “I watched your interview with Cringe like a hundred times,” Fiona blurted out, and then reddened when she realized she was being a fan girl on a professional conference call. “Sorry.”

  “Cringe is great,” the older girl said. “I have backstage passes for tonight if you want to meet up at the concert.”

  “I’m texting you my number right now.”

  “So let’s take a moment to review,” Ellen said, and tapped her screen twice to lock the video feed on herself. “Aliens may master human-style art and use it t
o influence our development,” she ticked off on her thumb, “or they might simply outcompete us,” she continued and folded down her forefinger. “There may be deep-pocketed tunnel network art investors buying Earth’s best works,” the middle finger went down, “or aliens hiring young humans to shop for the latest hot thing so they can spot our trends before we do,” she folded in her ring finger and then reached with her other hand to tap the smartphone screen. “Anything else?”

  “I have an artist cousin who works for Drazen Foods designing packaging,” Gerald said from across the table, where his own smartphone fed him into the video conference call. “I saw him last weekend, and he mentioned that he’s started getting offers from headhunters trying to lure him away to work for other alien businesses exporting from Earth. It turns out that some of his hand-colored labels are becoming collectible.”

  “Drazen foods exports jars with handmade labels?”

  “Not everything, just some of the high-end products, like certain types of honey and maple syrup. My cousin said that the glass blowers he works with on the gift items have been contacted by headhunters as well. So far everybody has stayed put because Drazen Foods takes care of their people.”

  “They also paid for the meeting hall I’m sitting in now,” Ellen said. “The Drazens have a tradition of building facilities for independent traders at their elevator stalks, and when they realized that the New York city-state didn’t have the budget, they stepped in.” She squinted at her phone and asked, “Does anybody else have a blinking red light in the corner of their screen?”

  “That’s the thirty-second warning,” somebody told her. “Our fifteen minutes are almost up.”

  “So I’ll see you all on Tuesday at the regular time and we’ll thrash out who is covering what,” Ellen said. “And keep in mind that we’re looking for stories about these issues from all angles, so you can focus on the arts angle, the business angle, the alien angle, it’s up to—drat,” she concluded as the video of herself talking on her phone was replaced by a black screen showing ‘Time Expired.’