Chapter 11
Priya Kesh was a name synonymous with success in most professional circles of the Bond. She had made her name, and her money, as a public relations guru for corporations like Fibrex, Disney, and later, Neotec. Her career had skyrocketed after she spun Fibrex from a failing corp with a bad reputation into one of Asia’s top employers. She started her own consultancy firm after that success and built herself an empire. Everybody who’s anybody in the corporate world wanted to work with her firm. Though, she had a reputation. There were apparently thousands of former employees who’d left her firm, and subsidiaries of her firm, with a bad taste in their mouths and nothing nice to say about working for her. Some described her as ‘brutal’, even ‘ruthless’. I hadn’t been surprised by that. Employee satisfaction is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the employer. It wasn’t until the first rumblings of Neotec’s teleportation tech that she dropped off the map entirely. Nobody had seen or heard from her in the last three years and her disappearance was expertly downplayed in every media outlet that asked questions about it. Her PR empire didn’t exactly need her to be making decisions by that point anyway. She had an entire C-suite of insanely well-paid managers to keep it all ticking.
So, the head of a corporate titan falls off the face of the Earth and nobody is any the wiser about what happened to her until a single photo of her surfaces on an obscure forum around ten months ago. The photo shows her boarding an outbound cruiser. Most likely, it seems now, headed for Khalo Station.
At least, that’s what I’d found out from my limited research of Earth media. I’d never heard of Priya Kesh. When I searched her name, four trillion results came up.
I left Cora and Del where they were while I made my way back downstairs. The noise on my floor was, yet again, in direct contrast with Cora’s spa-calm surroundings. It actually bugged me to the point where I’d checked the adjacent floors, which seemed to be as disruptive as mine. When I asked Cora about it she just shrugged. After the revelation of Cora’s relation to Kesh, she said she’d explain it to me later, and I would make sure to hold her to that. Rationally, I knew it was none of my business, and I made a point of never bringing up the fact that her parents tragically died, but part of me was a little hurt that she never told me she had other family on Earth.
Blood. Not family.
Her mother and father, Sumara and Matteo Tano, were both engineers and worked on the orbital platforms above Earth. They were part of an international team that had earned a great deal of respect for their work on the Lunar shipyards. They were responsible for the entire establishment of human presence on Luna, creating a network of tunnels and bubbles like something bygone speculators would’ve expected. Something they wouldn’t have expected though was the size and scale of the shipyards themselves. Monolithic structures rose from the lunar surface like a long-dead giant’s rib cage, the rest of his bones carried away by the tiny earthlings and recycled into something else. The cages kept the ongoing constructions suspended above the lunar surface while the engineering crews could move huge pieces of the ships into place in Luna’s pleasant microgravity. All that was before Cora had even been born.
When she arrived, her parents had been living on Luksha for three years, working as engineering consultants for the major projects arm of the Bond. Lukshae construction worked very differently from Earth. For one thing, Where a human construction crew might level a stretch of forest to build a few concrete monoliths, lukshae ‘adaptation crews’ would probably structure their designs around and throughout the forest, making as little impact as possible to the natural landscape. Of course, on Luksha, trees could reach five hundred meters tall and sixty meters wide. There was a photograph of Cora’s parents that she kept in her locker, that showed them standing together at the base of a k’ammeh tree. They were so minuscule in the photo that you could mistake it for just a photo of a tree. But they’re there. The tree trunk, as wide as the photo itself, was bare save for a gnarled and rugged texture. Deep fissures in the outermost layer of bark could pass for doorways to some other plane. The top of the photograph was draped with huge purple leaves that each had a lighter, almost lilac, symmetrical flare on either side of the midrib. Cora used to have the photo pinned to her mirror but I’d noticed some time ago that she’d taken it down.
By the time Cora was five years old, her parents had been working for the Luksha government, designing and advising on orbital structures that would streamline lukshae near-space operations as well as their ability to house and send truckers to and from Sol. On the day they had been honoured with a ceremony to celebrate their contributions to Luksha’s advancements in interstellar and interplanetary infrastructure, they were killed in an accident. Cora never told me what kind of accident. I guess that’s maybe all she knew.
***
One of my neighbours had their door retracted and was blasting dub into the corridor. A group of youths were huddled around the source of the music, evidently playing a game on their SubComs. They were taking turns swiping at the air in the middle of their huddle. After one of them grabbed at something invisible, a cheer went up around them. I shouldered past the gathered youths and locked the graffiti-covered door of my locker behind me. Though, I was pretty sure that if anyone wanted inside, they could kick a hole in it. When I surfaced from the Priya Kesh rabbit hole, it was 25H. The noise had died down in the corridor. It had gone from a deluge of thumping bass to the kind of muzzled din, indicative of the end of a party.
I ventured out, thinking that taking a walk might help me digest the various bombshells dropped over the last day. The further I got from my locker, and the closer to downtown Cho, the louder, smellier, and busier it became. Groups bustled from bar to bar through the main flow gangways and capillary-like corridors, desperate to get ‘there’ before anyone else. Wherever ‘there’ was. Each bar and eatery in Cho had something different to offer and boasted as much. The best noodles in Cho. The finest wine, direct from Greyson’s vineyard. The Pink Room boasted ‘the best beer on Khalo’. Their newly famed Pink PA, brewed right there on the premises, had been the latest in a series of marketing stunts that only served to bolster The Pink Room’s status as the place to go for really good beer. So that’s where I went.
The Pink effervescent liquid came to my table in a shapely liosen goblet, hand delivered by a beautiful french goddess named Astrid.
“Good evening, En. How are you?” Astrid said in an awkward french accent. However long she had been speaking english, she never lost the air-gargling quality of frenchness that suited her so well. It was somehow both confident and vulnerable, and it made something warm bloom in my stomach. I was too burnt out to skirt around the fact that I was really just pleased to be talking to her, and not deep in my own head.
“Honestly, I feel all the better for seeing you.” I said slightly sighing.
That’s so cringe. Why did you say that?
I braced for her to gag and vomit right onto my lap. But she just laughed.
Then she laughed some more.
“Yeah, okay, I get it,” I said, feeling a weight lift from my chest, and feeling the freedom to laugh at myself. “I mean it though, it’s been a long day and it’s good to see you.”
Her laughter died down to a giggle.
“You’ve had a bad day?” She asked.
“Not so much a bad day, just long and lots of work.”
“That’s a shame.”
“How’s your day been?”
“Good. I had a lesson with my Kuk’sui teacher, went to the new gym and spa over in Maraha. There is an amazing shawarma stand there. If you would like to, maybe we can go there sometime.
“To the gym? I know I’ve maybe put on a little weight recently but I didn’t think it was that bad.” I bantered.
“No! To the shawarma stand!”
“Oh! With you? Like, us, together?”
“Oui…” she said like it had been obvious.
“Yeah, I’d love to.”
“Good.” She nodded once. “Maybe tomorrow? Or the day after?”
“Uhhh yeah, tomorrow works for me.”
I sound like an idiot.
“Cool.” She started walking away. “Oh, and I don’t know if you have put on weight or if you were joking? But you look great.” Her hair swept in front of her eyes and she smiled shyly before getting back to work.
“Thanks,” I said as my cheeks burst into flames. I giddily drank my Pink PA, unable to wipe the smirk from my face. We exchanged glances for the next 20 minutes, and I ordered a rice bowl with edamame and hot sauce. Afterwards, I left, riding so high that I couldn’t remember what I’d been stressed about.
***
I caught up with Cora after I had gotten back to my locker and changed my day-old clothes. I was still smiling like an idiot after my conversation with Astrid. If Cora noticed my dorkish glow, she didn’t say anything. Del wasn’t at Cora’s locker when I arrived back there.
“Where’s Del?”
“She said she had to go take care of something. She was as specific as that.” Cora had been sitting on her bunk, forearms on her knees and looking at the photograph of her parents in front of the huge k’ammeh tree.
“It must be weird for you to be thinking about your parents again,” I said.
“There aren’t many days I don’t think about them. I used to look at this photograph every day and wonder what they’d think of me. If they’d be proud of me, or ashamed. Or if they’d be disappointed that I didn’t follow in their footsteps as a scientist or an engineer. I took it down because I hated the feeling of measuring myself against them all the time and never knowing if I’d fall short. It’s exhausting.”
“Yeah, I guess it would be.” I was surprised at her opening up like that. She was usually so closed off about her parents.
“Hearing that Kesh is on the station just brought up a lot of stuff that I’ve tried to bury.” She stared at the photograph some more. “The weird thing is; if Kesh had stepped in as my guardian like she was supposed to in the event of my parents death, she would’ve been my mother. I don’t have any complaints about Kart’e or Gwe’yl. They did their best to give me a loving home and all that but most of the time they had at least three other kids to worry about. Sometimes there would be six of us, all needing attention and they just didn’t have the time to give to each of us. When I was six or seven years old, I had gotten wise to that fact and just started fending for myself. It’s probably why I left as soon as I was allowed.”
“Man, that must’ve been horrible. Why did your foster siblings come and go?”
“Sometimes they’d be put with another family by the authority, sometimes they were violent or abusive toward the other kids and just didn’t fit in and so had to be moved to a more specialised facility or to another family that could give them the attention they needed. I wasn’t always told why someone was taken away. One day they were there, the next they weren’t. I never got attached enough to any of them for it to be hard for me. At least, not after Rol’et. He was a year or two younger than me and we didn’t share a word of communal language. But, we played together with our haltones and we solved puzzles together, meditated together. We did everything together. One day he was just gone. I was so upset I cried for a week.
“What happened to him?”
“Kart’e and Gwe’yl wouldn’t tell me. After that, I didn’t get too attached to any of them. There was always the fear that they’d just disappear one day. Or that I’d be taken away somewhere, but I suppose not many families on Luksha wanted a human kid.”
“That actually explains a whole lot about you.” I said.
“What do you mean?” She only sounded a little defensive.
“Well, how long have we known each other?
“I dunno. A few Khalo cycles. Maybe ten Earth years?”
“Right. And you know that you’re not very…” I gestured widely. “Open.”
“I’m being open right now.”
“And I’m touched that you feel you can be open with me. But again, It’s taken ten years to get here!” I laughed. Cora smiled.
“Well, okay, point taken. Now you know why, I suppose.” She said, looking at me then the floor then back to me. “I trust you, En. With my life. I know I don’t show that often but, when it comes down to it, you’re the person I trust most.”
“Likewise.” I couldn’t help but smile. I offered her a fist bump and she smacked it away, rolling her eyes.
“Anyway, it’s just weird having Kesh on the station. Part of me wants to reach out to her as Sumara’s daughter and ask why she abandoned me on an alien planet. But then again, it’s ancient history. For both of us.”
“Why do you think she’s here?”
“No idea, maybe she’s working for Neotec?”
“Not according to Company accounts.”
“You cracked Neotec’s company accounts?”
“Didn’t have to. All their employment registers are completely public. Buried under a mountain of system hierarchy, but public.”
“Interesting.” She nodded. “And no mention of her?”
“Not one. Doesn’t mean she’s not working for them off-book. Seems like she may only be involved with The Fall.”
“Maybe.”
“She disappeared a couple of years ago. Completely. Like, no sign of her at all. No image captures, no footage of her, no biometric hits, passport trail, medical, nothing. She literally dropped off the face of the Earth. I don’t think her own company even knew where she had gone. Official statement brushed off the obvious questions as a sabbatical. That is until an image of her surfaced less than a year ago." I flicked on my SubCom, encrypted the image with a self-scrambler and ported it to an invisible wall between us using the augmented reality workspace that came as standard soft for SubComs. I didn’t want to risk sending it over open comms. There was little, or no protocols for keeping private information private. Everything that was sent or received on the public network was as good as broadcast for anyone who knew what they were doing to find. If you used it on the regular, there was a good chance of getting your identity, or worse, your credit stolen.
Navigating the SubCom’s interface took a lot of getting used to, but by then I had just about mastered it. When you got a SubCom installed, as almost everyone did, tiny filament wires that were routed from the CPU in your temple to your molars and canines on either side detected the tiniest amount of pressure applied by your tongue. Molars were for cycling through menus, canines for selections and returns. Since the Subcom also tracked the focal point of your right eye. Most of the operation you could perform with just eye movements and your right canine. Some operations though, like running encryptions, required a little more fine manipulation.
The image itself showed Priya Kesh in the clear box of a jetway, looking back over her shoulder toward the camera. In front of her, the huge bulk of an orbital cruiser stood waiting for her. She wore a yellow sari and carried a hiking pack on her back. There was no one else in the photograph save for a silhouette or two in the dark windows of the cruiser. The funny thing was that she looked like she was expecting the photograph to be taken.
“I don’t get it. Why would she go to all the trouble of hiding herself from every method of identification on the planet, only to pose for a photographer at the very last moment?”
“Ego, maybe?” Cora shrugged. “Maybe she just wanted to throw up a middle finger to everyone before she left.”
“I don’t buy it. If this was something she wanted seen, it’d be everywhere. She ran a PR empire. I found it on an old forum for conspiracy theories. She must’ve had it buried.”
“What was the conspiracy?”
“That she was a lizard person from the fourth dimension.”
“Sounds plausible.”
“I haven’t ruled it out.”