All the Birds in the Sky

“Shut up shut up!” Laurence said. “I’m a wunderkind, okay?” He took a moment to look at the two women, reflected on how lucky he was to have such clever weirdos working with him, and vowed yet again that he was not going to let this project fail. He wasn’t going to let Milton, or any of them, down. He was going to do better, somehow.

Then Laurence jumped out of the autocopter, trusting the steel-cord-and-pulley mechanism to lower him at a fast — but not too fast — clip. He wanted to land on his feet. For a moment, there was nothing but sky all around him, and then the Dogpatch was rising up, and the brand-new brutalist tower blocks grew in proportion to the ancient warehouses and docks around them. The air was searing hot, even with the wind.

Laurence’s face was on every computer screen in town right now — except the screens of the company whose roof deck Laurence was dropping onto right now, MatherTec. MatherTec’s computer screens were spewing gibberish, thanks to a clownware-injection attack that Laurence had unleashed on the company’s servers ten minutes earlier.

From the standpoint of the MatherTec founders and angel investors, here’s what happened: They were on their roof deck giving a presentation to a set of VCs in a frantic effort to secure second-round funding for their technology, which wasn’t just another app but rather a way to create stable openings in space-time, with a million possible long-term uses if they could just get some investment. And then, just as their slide presentation was reaching the crucial moment, their screens went staticky and showed the stars-and-snakes logo of the Symbiotic Liberation Army, the world’s most obnoxious hacker group, and nothing they could do would get the presentation back. The investors fidgeted and started to badger the gothy waitress from the catering company for more macaroons, and Earnest Mather was tearing his frizzy reddish-brown hair out. And just then, the wunderkind — that guy whose long, corn-fed face had been everywhere today — dropped out of the sky and handed Earnest Mather a check, already signed by Milton Dirth, for $10 million. “We’re not investing,” Laurence told Earnest before the company founder could even count the zeroes. “We’re buying you out. We want your technology, and a few of your people.”

Earnest wanted time to think it over, but Laurence told him he had five minutes. The angel investors were already badgering him to take the damn money, and the VCs were all too busy MeeYuing their videos of Laurence’s descent from the sky to think about making a counter-offer.

A few minutes later, Laurence (or rather Milton) owned this company. Earnest Mather was taking a bottle of Devil’s Bargain IPA from the gothy waitress and draining it. Laurence rolled up next to Earnest and helped himself to the final macaroon. “Sorry about the theatrics, man,” Laurence said. “We needed your patents, plus we couldn’t risk having them fall into the wrong hands. You could have the next WMD here. And we’re on a tight timetable, to Save the World before it’s too late.”

Earnest, still kind of goggle-eyed, said something about the world being a work in progress.

“Milton really thinks we’re going to need a new planet, maybe soon,” Laurence continued. “We’ve got to get off this rock. All our models suggest a decent likelihood of a catastrophic combination of natural disasters and destructive war, within one or two generations. Look at Seoul. Look at Haiti.” Laurence reached for one of those beers as well. “As far as we know, we’re the only intelligent, technological civilization ever to develop, in the entire universe. There’s complex life all over the place, but we’re still basically unique. We have a fucking duty to preserve that. At all costs.”

Laurence started to explain about how he’d dreamed of nothing, since he was a little kid, but leaving this planet. But Earnest had to run to the executive washroom to dry-heave. Laurence squirreled all the signed paperwork into his breast pocket of his nice black suit and then looked up at the gothy waitress for the first time. It was Patricia.

“Whoa,” Laurence said. “What are you doing here?” He had a panic attack that she was spying on him or stalking him, for a second.

“What does it look like?” she said. “I’m waitressing. My roommate Deedee hooked me up with this job.”

Laurence looked at her crisp white blouse and black knee-length skirt, silhouetted against the pale blue sky. Her dark hair was pinned back but still caught the bay wind. Her eyes looked leaf green. Her slender lips were pursed.

“Are you serious? I thought you were like…”—he lowered his voice—“… a witch now. You went to that special school, right?”

“I have other jobs besides this one, sure,” Patricia said. “But I don’t get paid for those. I need to pay rent in this city, which is a lot, even with two roommates.”

“Oh.”