Chapter 1

I set off down the street, in the direction of the stadium. There were some decent cafés on the way, and I was sure that the best way to begin solving this intractable problem was to soak my sorrows in a double-shot latté. A few hits of caffeine are always good to get the mind going.

People didn't notice me as I ambled my way towards Billy's, a cozy spot near 5th Avenue. It was odd, suddenly noticing how invisible I was. Like I wasn't even there. I gazed at people as they passed, and they never even saw me. It was like walking through a movie (which you can do nowadays, and woe be to the person who forgets whether he's in a movie or real life!). I wanted to shout, "Hey, look at me! I'm back on Earth! I just got ripped of all my money!" But you know, they're talking on the phone, or they're shopping in their little HUDs while they walk, or – strangenesses of strangeness – perhaps even walking together and talking in real time, physically with one another.

Jesus, Earth has changed. People don't really inhabit their bodies anymore. They're just these empty bodies floating through the wireless space of their minds, all connected to each other through the SuperNet. Oh sure, people are walking around like always. But they're talking to nobody in particular, because you can't see the ocular and aural implants that give them a permanent internal videophone. Or they're walking along, staring straight ahead, but their eyes are vacant because they're off staring at the merchandise projected onto their field of vision. Look, there's a man buying a bouquet gift set for his scorned wife, there's a woman picking out a new sweater for tonight's party, there's a couple kids sitting on a step, laughing and gyrating with empty eyes as if they belong in a mental institution…but no, they're just playing an interactive video game that they see in their collective heads. Welcome to the future.

Ha, I'm just kidding. I can't really see what other people are looking at. I'm guessing. I don't know what they're looking at. But I have a good idea. Because I have those implants too, so I know what people do with them. Of course, I know some of the things people shouldn't be doing with them too…like watching porn in the middle of the workday or while they sit on the tram. After all, no one can see what you see. Watching porn in one corner of your eye while chatting with somebody at a cocktail party with the other is an entertaining novelty, but I've never quite understood it. Who wants to walk around a cocktail party with a woody? Sure, no one knows what you're looking at. Please.

It's weird, though….having such privacy in a world of such interconnectedness. If you look at the history of the modern world, that's what you basically see. The more connected things get, the more isolated people seem to become. I've never quite understood this phenomenon. If you tried to draw it on a graph for a social scientist, he'd take one look at it and fall to the floor in seizure. Two opposing lines going up in the same curve? It doesn't make any sense. It defies the mind and any attempt to wrestle it back down to the realm of comprehension.

I have a theory though. Wanna hear it? I think the physical body can only take so much. They say the human body is this incredible machine that handles billions of bits of information per second. Perhaps. But not consciously. Consciously, most people live in a very narrow band of perception. And when you start stretching that band too far --- when you start interconnecting every person, every institution, every idea, every ambition, every desire, every fear, every television show, and every Pop-Tart with every other --- the mind just starts to shut down. People isolate because they just can't take that much interconnectedness. The mind trips its own fuse before it blows up.

I don't know. Some people complain that the technology itself is isolating, even as it seeks to join things together. They say that because people connect and relate virtually, they've lost touch with a physical connection that's somehow more "real." I don't know if I agree with that. I think it's just changed how people relate.

But what the fuck do I know? I'm an old, broke, jobless space miner. (Did I mention I was old?) I've spent the last 10 years of my life (minus a few vacations) on a family of asteroids in deep space, halfway between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. We don't have shopping there. We've got heavy equipment, dirty hand tools, some medical kits, a couple computer control centers, and lights. Jesus, lots of lights. You wouldn't believe how dark it is on an asteroid (unless you're sunward, of course, in which case you can get your ass fried).

We humans are old space hands now, but the first time you stand on an asteroid in the middle of space, you feel a chill right down to your bone. There is something deep and fundamental inside that literally brings you to your knees; you gasp, you leap down to the ground and cling to the powdery rock to keep from falling (even though you're doing nothing of the kind), because you know deep down inside that standing on a big rock with nothing between you and the Universe but a couple of steps just isn't right. I think we're always just a couple of steps from the Universe – hell, we live in it, for God's sake – but you just don't get that same sense of it standing on Earth. But take that first step on the black surface of an asteroid (all the better if it's got a good spin on it), in the black ocean of space, and you will be vomiting in your helmet within seconds, I guarantee it. If you can hear me laughing right now, I reckon you're getting my point.

Sigh. There I go again. Philosophizing. The guys always said I thought too much. The tired joke was that ol' Sean Brennan had his head so high in the clouds that he floated right off the Earth and somehow drifted into our control center.

Melanie 7455 was the name of the asteroid family we were mining. It was a large-sized family, 54 separate rocks total, with the biggest one about the size of New Hampshire. And those rich rocks were just full of high-revenue minerals. Atlas was making a killing on that family alone. I was in charge of that operation for 10 years, running things from the control center, managing the budget, resolving disputes among the workers, and basically making sure Melanie made her fair contribution to the noble cause of energy production.

I had worked on that family for 3 years before I took the top seat. It was an odd thing. I was one of the senior miners, but not in the management hierarchy (What am I saying, what miner is?). Anyway, both the director and the deputy director met an untimely end in a freak accident…all the more so a "freak" accident because they both got whacked, in a place they would not have both likely been at the same time. And there were some rumors about some improprieties going on in the top office…things were said that suggested they were skimming the miners' pay, there were complaints about the equipment not being provided with the kind of quality components it needed to maintain safety, and so forth. A festering anger had been growing among the miners for some time. I never got involved – I don't do politics – and I would never suggest a link between the two situations, but they both did occur around the same time.

Now, I said I was a senior guy. Only in the sense of my clout with the other miners. I'm pretty quiet, and I keep to myself, and as I said, I don't do politics. But I do know my asteroid-mining, and I believe the others respected that. So when the director and deputy director of our little deep-space operation had their…accident, that left a couple of lowly technicians in the control office, some administrative staff spread across a couple of the bigger asteroids, and several hundred angry (some would say vindicated) miners. And these rough-and-tumble rock-gutters let the office pukes know in no uncertain terms that I had been appointed the new director, effective immediately.

Now, you must understand, asteroid mining is not a democratic venture. Atlas' management aren't voted in by anybody. They're appointed by corporate HQ. These miners took a huge risk muscling me into a management position in the control office, aside from any other, you know, actions that they might or might not have taken, or fantasized about at some unknown or speculated time in the past which is not part of any formal record that I'm aware of.

Anyway, the techs and the admins accepted the miners' decision without question – what tie-wearing punk is going to take on a few hundred Hercules' by himself in the middle of space? I reluctantly accepted it too; after all, what could I say? But there was still the matter of Corporate. I knew it wasn't really our decision to make. So I politely hailed Corporate, spoke to one of their MSL's (mining station liaisons), explained that we had lost our fearless leaders in an unfortunate accident, and that the miners had expressed a willingness to accept my leadership until Corporate could send replacements. We chatted briefly, this smarmy little prick in a bowtie back on Earth and I, him quizzing me on my qualifications and capacity for leadership. I mean, this was just ridiculous. We're out in the middle of deep-space, a mining station with its management head cut off, and he's quizzing me on my qualifications, as if I wanted the bloody job. And then he gave me a pompous little sniff, as would any man troubled by the poor help he is always forced to make do with, and then he pronounced in his self-important way – just so's I didn't forget who was in charge, you understand – that he was making the executive decision to leave me in charge on a probationary basis to see if I had what it took for a longer-term position in management.

Remember that sick feeling you get when you first step out on an asteroid? That uncontrollable urge to vomit? Mustering my years of salted experience and my notoriously steely resolve, I was somehow able to hold it back. I told him we'd torpedo the bodies back to Earth orbit where he could pick them up and I slammed my hand down on the console to cut the transmission, punctuated with a choice curse made just for corporate worms like him.

And thus began my tenure in Atlas management. Being a miner and not a business graduate, I understood well the people under my command and I did my best by them. I developed some new production techniques that increased both output and safety, and I treated my people like the hard-working people they were, instead of the slaves of consumer production that Corporate tended to treat them like. I didn't tolerate fistfights, stealing or other kinds of destructive behavior, and I had to be the one to cut into a few of those fights myself to end them. (One such intervention, involving a knife-weilding antagonist, got me a deep slice in my hip that left me in the infirmary for weeks…and landed the misbehaving rat in a jail cell back home.) But I was fair and talked straight, and we had a very productive decade. After three years of me learning my new ropes, we started winning corporate records for output ratios, budget underruns, safety streaks, and employee morale. If Atlas thought they were making money on the Melanie cluster before, they doubled and (later) tripled it after I took over as station director.

But all good things must come to an end, so the saying goes. The Company just pink-slipped me one day. A shuttle arrived the next, with my replacement (another bright business graduate with the muscle of Corporate HQ behind him), and he gave me one hour to collect my things and ship off.

Aw, hell, I don't want to think about that part of the story. What a crock of shit that was. But I later found that it was just the beginning of my troubles.

After a few months of kicking around on Earth, a place I don't even understand anymore, I ran into that bastard Geelan. If Atlas gave me an unwanted ride home, Geelan drove my ship right to the cleaners. Dirty in, clean out, as the saying goes. Or is that, dirtied in, cleaned out?