When humanity finally reached the stars, our emissaries to the galaxy were not high-minded diplomats, selfless explorers or dashing fleet captains. Rather, as in eras of expansion past, young men and women sailed into the unknown for many reasons. Some sought riches, others power; all felt the old world had nothing to offer. They used, killed, stole, wasted. They were human, and magnificent.
Many died. Untried ships failed. The slightest mistake was fatal. Space itself was deadly. Most of the survivors gained little, ending their days bankrupt, with nothing but stories to show for all their risks and sacrifices. A few profited. A tiny handful returned to the core worlds as wealthy as the Conquistadores had returned to Spain and as renowned as the East India Company officers had returned to England.
Slade Pohlmann left the Fleet at twenty-eight, with interstellar pilot's skills and nothing else. His peers found lucrative, boring jobs ferrying colonists; he found investors and leased an ancient ship for a month. He spent the time charting a new jump series between Sirius and New Taipei. Maps shaving one jump off the nine-jump standard route earned millions at auction, but his investors claimed all but a pathetic handful of the proceeds.
He'd discovered the new route while on duty with the Fleet. Having given his one discovery of value away and gained little, he did what many doomed explorers before and since have done: he took those scraps and spent them all to buy another month's lease of that horrible little ship. Slade Pohlmann rolled the dice.
This time he simply jumped toward the nearest uncharted system. After a month's desperate search for something of value, he was down to his last jump before his point of no return when he scanned a comet that was to set a record for the highest concentration of fusion-ready helium ever found on an interstellar body. He did not notice that it was incredibly beautiful. Characteristically, he was mystified by the outcry from some parts of the press that the fusion strip mining would leave the thing unrecognizable. There was money to be made, and he made it; the aesthetics did not matter.
That comet left him a rich man; most would have turned their backs on the cold, the terror, the uncertainty. Slade Pohlmann left his chips on the table and bet again. He bought a bigger, faster ship, hired a good crew, and went back out. He kept at it for fifteen years.
His combination of cold-hearted pragmatism and fantastic luck left him, once he finally decided to take his winnings and leave the game, very wealthy. So wealthy that he realized with bemusement that he was able to buy not only a planet, but a nice planet. The Frontier was a dirty place. He had lied, cheated, stolen, broken every exploration law on the Council's books, and even killed. And now he had no damn clue what to do.
It was extremely small of him to whine, he told himself, thinking about his situation while staring at the ceiling after waking. He was technically forty-five, now, after two years of directionless hedonism, but gene therapy had left him looking perhaps thirty and feeling younger. Not that it had been time wasted. He considered the slightly sweat-scented arm draped over his chest, and its owner. Her name was Cecilia; she was an heiress on Asclepion to buy herself a new body through science.
Proper gene therapy required close expert attention over a period of months. The rich and powerful, who could afford the best, generally went to combination resort-hospitals for theirs. There they could while away the hours between therapy sessions with as much debauchery as possible. Slade usually avoided overt displays of wealth - for example, he still usually wore a simple crewman's jumpsuit and the sort of jacket common among pilots for centuries - and though he partied with the aristocracy, he drew the line at living with them. He commissioned a custom house with a private beach on Asclepion. 80 degrees year-round, water almost as warm, twenty minutes by groundcar to the nearest exclusive gene therapy center and all the social delights.
A black panel on the koa-wood bedroom wall glowed blue and sounded a soft chime. A clipped, slightly husky female voice whispered, "May I come in?"
It was ludicrous for Vee to ask to "come in," of course; she had sensors throughout the house and monitored them all continuously. She had learned, however, that sometimes Slade's guests preferred the illusion of privacy.
He cleared his throat and said, "Sure, Vee."
A blue holographic representation of a female face appeared in front of the panel and said, "You requested that I wake you for exercise at this time."
Slade slid gently out from under the girl without waking her - carefully; she had remarkably large breasts with dark little nipples, Slade remembered with a smile - and took a long shower. He was well equipped to exploit Asclepion's female resources. An unattached, taut ex-explorer pilot? It was the easiest competitive environment he'd ever experienced. He'd even kept a couple of facial scars to enhance the weathered flyboy effect. Slade was comfortable with himself and confident; after a gravity slingshot through a binary system in a ship venting plasma, what was a there to fear? His conquests included several actresses, a women's grav-lance champion, and the Queen of Arcturus (who was old enough to be his grandmother, but looked about twenty, and had easily been his favorite).
He left the shower eagerly anticipating a resumption of the night's activities, but found Cecilia hung over and fully dressed. She was in the middle of VI communication with someone, wearing ornate half-rim glasses blacked out for video linkup. She finished the call with a huff, took off the glasses and demanded to borrow his groundcar. Without much regret he programmed it to take her to her hotel, and pulled on a pair of exercise shorts. He shot out the beach doors backwards, calling to the nearest interface as he did so, "Be ready when I get back, Vee!"
Vee had been with him since his third voyage. In those days she had been an "it," Olympus Mons Computing Mark V, a simple navigation and ship maintenance AI. Many pilots were leery of AIs as crutches, preferring to rely on their own skills, but Slade had found the assistance useful and customized his AI to complement rather than substitute for himself and his human crew. Inevitably he started addressing it as she, as pilots have feminized their ships through history, and his crew nicknamed her Vee.
She became more complex and powerful as rapidly as Slade could afford to upgrade her. At some point Slade consciously broke the Artificial Intelligence Limitation Act, allowing - encouraging - her to evolve and grow. He gambled that by the time he was caught, she'd be too sentient for legal termination. He won. As her creator he was subject to full penalties for violation of the Act, but by that time he was capable of bribery on a grand scale and he didn't serve a day of the statutory ten-year sentence.
The only unofficial condition of his commutation was that he retain custody of Vee and keep her existence quiet. This was an unnecessary stricture; by then he would have no sooner gotten rid of her than he would have gotten rid of one of his own limbs. She was the secret of his later success; a peerless manager, she quickly learned to disguise herself as human over communications, and in so doing, quickly became more human herself.
Slade had been worried that his retirement would bore her, but she had easily settled into a massive mainframe in the basement of the beach house. The house had power and communications lines that would have done a major research institution proud. She'd used the constant Net connection to become a highly successful, and quite illegal, investment AI. Finding that easy, Vee devoted most of her computing power to intensive self-development. Slade noticed her getting a little more communicative and emotional every day.
Slade broke into a run on the beach. Even with the dry sand clogging his stride he made good time. Most people with major gene therapy got lazy, but he enjoyed the rush of physical training and had been pleased to discover that his latest therapies had given him phenomenal recovery times, allowing strenuous workouts twice a day. He turned around after half an hour and increased his pace on the return leg; a kilometer short of the house he broke into a sprint, angled toward the ocean, and used a rock at the edge of the surf as a launch point for a running dive.
Vee was waiting for him when he walked out of the ocean and onto the beach in front of his house. She was in the chassis she used for housekeeping, and to interact with Slade when necessary. It was designed to resemble, but not mimic, a five-foot-six young woman, rather powerfully built. Vee recognized and tried to avoid the 'uncanny valley' effect of too closely simulating human appearance and behavior. She intentionally retained a recognizably artificial voice and the chassis was designed along the same lines. Most of it was covered in a white exoskeleton, made of a slightly translucent plastic; under it was a powerful, nearly indestructible body of exotic alloys. This was visible through gaps in the outer plates. The face, most important for communication with humans, was more finely articulated, with hundreds of subsurface servos allowing her limited expression.
She cocked her head to one side and placed her hands on her hips. "I hope you did not exhaust yourself. It would be disappointing if you were unable to match me physically," she said.
Slade gave no answer, but lowered himself to her height as he approached, reaching for her neck with his right hand. She instantly blocked with her left forearm, feinting a low sweep with a leg and then going for a right uppercut. He wasn't there; dropping lower, he spun around her, putting a hand behind her thigh to disturb her balance before attempting a throw. It failed; her strength let her keep her feet by brute force and he danced away before she could get a solid hold.
