Salvation

“Hey, stop being such a bloody lawyer! You’re supposed to be adaptive software, right? Well, pay attention and learn. I don’t like being distracted with this kind of crap while I’m working. This is why I buy programs like you, so, just…make my life easier, okay?”

“Very well, Callum.”

He held back on a bad-tempered reply. That easier life could have been real if he’d bought a fifth-generation Turing. They were so much smarter; one of them would have picked up on all his nuances and understood what he wanted, sparing him this grief of having to spell everything out. But a G5 was beyond his current budget.

Next time I get promoted…

Callum pulled on his trousers. There were no clean socks. “Fuck’s sake!” He tugged a reasonable-ish pair out of the washing pile. His trainers still had beach sand in them; he grinned fondly at that as he strapped them up. Next to the alarm clock was the tube with his e-contacts, and next to that was a pair of basic screen glasses. He chose the glasses. Somehow this morning he was in no mood to faff about with contact lenses. Damn, I miss her.

Finally he put his smartCuff on, a simple band three centimeters wide that could have passed as black glass if it hadn’t been so flexible. Once he’d slipped it over his knuckles it shrank to a perfect fit around his wrist. It ran a biometric to check his identity and immediately linked to his dermal grains through mInet. A neat column of sapphire data slid down the left-hand side of his screen lens.

He didn’t bother reading it. Just having it there, up and active, was reassuring. The mInet made him part of the world again.

“Hey there, Apollo, are we running smooth?”

“Good morning, Cal,” the mInet’s electronic identity replied through the audio grain embedded in his ear. Everybody gave their mInet a tag; and Callum had been obsessed with the Apollo moonshot when he was in his teens, to the extent of building flying models of Saturn V’s.

“You’ve got full mInet connectivity with your peripherals,” Apollo said. “Your blood sugar levels aren’t good.”

“Yeah, it’s morning, pal. Keep a watch on House; I want to know when my credit’s back up.”

“You’re already solvent again.”

He would have said thank you to House, but some deep Luddite part of his mind refused to recognize the G3Turing as a genuine personality.

Like all meat these days, the bacon was printed, with a use-by date eighteen months away. He dropped a couple of rashers in the frying pan. He didn’t need to check the bread’s use-by; it was moldy, so no bacon sandwich. There was one egg left, a natural one. He couldn’t scramble it because the buttermilk was ripe enough to make his eyes water when he sniffed it; and as his grandmother had drilled into him, that was the only true way to make scrambled eggs. Black coffee, then. He shoved a capsule into the outsize chrome-plated Italian barista machine and waited while it ran through its usual tune of choking steam noises.

“Stream the overnights for me,” he asked Apollo as he cracked the egg on the side of the frying pan. By some miracle the yolk didn’t break.

The kitchen wallscreen produced a grid of news streams determined by adaptive preference filters. He sipped the coffee with growing satisfaction as five of the ten news channels focused on disasters across Europe. He scanned them quickly to see if any of them threatened to contaminate the surrounding area; those he might well wind up dealing with during his shift. The major one that had developed while he slept was a blaze in a Frankfurt theatre. Seven fire tenders were dealing with it, sending long white arcs of foam playing over the inferno. “No,” Callum said. Apollo tracked his gaze slipping to the second grid and pulled that one to the front. A landslide in Italy brought on by excessive rains, three houses in a mountain village washed away. He glanced at the next grid. A sinking yacht in the sea off the coast of Malta, surrounded by Coast Guard ships and news drones. “Sorry, my friend, can’t help you.” He flipped the bacon. Fourth, a radioactive waste disposal facility just outside Gylgen, Sweden, which had undergone an evacuation during the night. Unconfirmed reports that the waste storage containers had cracked. “Crap.” A live feed gave him a company spokesman standing outside the gates, assuring reporters that evacuation was “just a precaution,” and there was absolutely no spillage.

Callum stared at the uneasy spokesman, not believing a word of his clichés. “Call Moshi,” he said.

His deputy’s comms icon came up in the screen lens. “Are you monitoring the Gylgen facility?”

“Way ahead of you, boss,” Moshi Lyane replied cheerfully. “The G5Turing caught it within a minute. There’s been a lot of executive chatter with the Environment Enforcement Agency.”

“Spillage?”

“Satellite’s not showing anything. Yet. But the containers are below ground level. If there’s a leak, it’s not vapor.”

“What does Dok say?