Extract from “ Mind-Forged Manacles” by David A Sutton from “Subtle Edens: An Anthology of Slipstream Fiction”

I was driving my Nissan Strato through fog, the sun dull red. It was midday and hot as hell, but I thought no more about the lurid sky than about the oil lakes bordering the road.

This was my first outback commission. I’d worked in the admin of PC Pty for three years you see, and had asked for reassignment. The one job that was, reputedly, not utterly boring was Pollution Control Transactor. So, after a year’s training, there I was, PCT extraordinaire!

Well, okay, maybe not...

I preferred to drive relaxed, but the smog was making me concentrate. Hummocks of coarse grass had sprung through the asphalt, pimpling its surface and it would be easy to be bumped into the oil slime. Not many autos came this way. Not that there should have been, except for maybe a service truck. I was four hundred kilometres from the nearest city.

A battered overhead road sign waved from its rusted struts, a faded shadow of an arrow, pointing nowhere. Somewhere, up ahead, there was a turnoff, another ancient highway that used to cut through the scrub to some anonymous and derelict township. I found myself unconsciously patting the Compulsory Use Land Order in my shirt pocket, and glancing at the Needle P23 automatic rifle clamped above my head.

My company was top notch in the extraction of minerals, oil, ores; you name it, we dig it up. Pollution Control is peerless at negotiating with the multitudes of interested parties who occupied the land we wanted. And they were called Polluters, the land thieves I was about to visit. Instead of living in the cities, they made fools of themselves beyond safety and beyond the law. They wanted the land, wanted it for themselves, with no thought about the needs of the bulk of humanity. That’s why I became a PCT. I can’t stand these people with woolly ideas. They go through life in the blissful hope that EarthCol will still look after them if Earth’s engine-system breaks down and allows nature to re-dominate.

Fools .

The daily morning fog was at last beginning to burn off and to my right emerged the thousands of pumps of the InSig Oil Field; one of our finest. The view was hypnotic, a vast plain of scrub desert, stretching as far as the eye could see, with all those lubricated steel pistons tipping and lifting in a ceaseless robotic dance.

Robotic...They reminded me of Toby, on the back seat of the car. I had not yet got used to the idea of him riding up front. Him euphemistically. We call them Ghosts, but that was just to avoid calling them Biologically Engineered Humanoids. The company that manufactured them, a subsidiary of PC, called them Gentecs.

Toby was ‘Ghosting’ me. It had been programmed to respond to my company’s objectives and business ethic. The right of land contract. The law circumscribed the Ghost’s operating parameters. It came armed with a needle-auto handgun.

My boss at PC had always said, treat the Gentec as you would a companion; more, a business associate, a partner. Albeit the partner was in reality a bodyguard, intended to exert as much, or as little, pressure as might be required, depending on the circumstances.

I have to be honest and admit that the Ghost spooked me for reasons I can’t rightly explain. That’s why he – it – was in the back. I simply could not face having something sit next to me that wasn’t, well, alive. Even less having it drive the Strato, which it could do quite easily.

Nobody, but nobody, is going to drive my auto!

“Next left turnoff, Wellman.”

The voice from the rear startled me for a second, as if the Gentec had read my thoughts. But it was just another of its functions. I grimaced. Maybe that was what I hated about them, their ability to sometimes be one step ahead of you. I can’t help denying that I detest that.

“Okay – ” I replied, nearly adding ‘fuckhead’, but I knew that that would be a reflection of my prejudice and would in any event have no effect on him “ – Toby. Thanks.”

I made the turn, trying to forget what a stupid name Toby was for a Ghost. Okay, so it was an attempt to humanise them, a final touch. Still, I’d rather have called it fuckhead.

 

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