Standing astride a rusted ten-speed bicycle in the parking lot of Tychor Shipyard, and watching a Porsche 911 streak away up the hill toward the downtown of Straits City, I realized a fundamental truth.



Crime does pay, very well indeed. I could say that I can sleep at night, but sometimes the suffering of the guilty haunts my dreams. Probably the client rep, a peculiar institution relevant to this reality, this timeline, slept very well comforted by the pillow of easy wealth. If his conscience ever bothered him, he might well remember his suffering, a bruised finger, a taunting remark, one summer he actually had to work for a living, to delude himself into believing that he had earned his priviledge.



Who was I kidding? For all I knew he could be a tortured soul. But somehow I doubted it.



I biked up hill a quarter-mile, and began to search the blocks looking for parking lots. My hope was that the client rep had chosen to eat in the downtown area seeing as it was more expensive. The second lot I found had a fellow who with a little help with his lunch money pointed out the car. He didn’t let me get close to it, but that was all I needed to know. That and directions to another restaurant.



The third nearby shop had reservations, a snooty waiter, and expensive wooden chairs infringing on the public space of the sidewalk. Somehow, I knew I had found my target.



Another bribe, err gratuity, got me in to eat quickly. And I saw my target talking to a young lovely with too perfect blonde hair. The chances of this being his wife were, well, slimmer than even she was.



I ate a sandwich, and onion rings, and contemplated courses of action. Sitting twenty-five feet from the guy put me rather in the position of the dog who caught the car. Now what do I do?



If I accosted him, I would get thrown out, or I would thrash the help until the police showed, and then eventually, I would end up in jail.



I could not hear what he said, and the little I could lip read seemed to be the type of stuff best not repeated.



Some people have argued that humans should be called homo faber, tool-maker, instead of intelligent. I lacked the tools. No camera, no parabolic microphone except for my Lekostian cyber-ear which would not work in this low tech of an environment. It was optimized for the Lekostian Star Empire’s tech level, and so even simple techs required high levels of technology to activate them. When they worked, they worked very well. My cyberware required a thought command to activate.



I really needed to get some more less advanced cyberware installed.



The dinner ended, and the lovebirds headed out the door, and I still wanted to pass on taking pictures of adultery, so I sat there and stewed trying to think of some way of getting the goods on the client rep. Finally, the waiter chased me out.



I stood outside on the street, and considered. A few ways into the problem opened for me. They were illegal however. Wiretapping, hacking into his computer, posing as a person legally authorized to look at his bank statements, I rejected these approaches as not ethical. In other circumstances, say overthrowing a tyrannical government, such action would be acceptable, but in this case, I would cause more harm than good. Besides, there were more legal methods available, I was sure of it.



Coming back down to my chained up bike, I saw a cut chain, and no bike. Stolen. In my bleak mood, I just accepted it as more proof that the universe had it in for me. The afternoon streets seemed forlorn and people gave me ill-favoured looks as I moped about.



Eventually, I found myself walking along the waterfront as the sun began to go down. Dozens of beautiful white boats crowded the boatyard perched at the end of a pier, and so fascinated, I walked up it past the couples, and the fishermen.



The floating boatyard turned out to be an artifact of some obscure twist in taxation law which shielded it from taxes as long as it could be moved. I walked along the rocking and falling wooden dividing sidewalks with their cut-in-half tire bumpers, and felt a certain excitement and glee. The sea air and the lovely ships contributed, but also a plan was rising up out of my subconscious.



For some reason, I looked closely at the names of the boats. “Happy Runner”; “Daytimer”; “Rich Retiree”; none of them inspired me. “Ruthless” looked interesting.



I talked to the owner, a weathered and white-haired but still muscular man, who was working on board. Yes, he had been involved in shipping. And yes, he had been royally messed over by some of his office mates. I asked him about the name, and he grinned.



“I first christened her ‘Ruth’ after my second wife. When the corporate thieves got me out of the company, and she left me, why I changed that to ‘Ruthless’.” 1



Laughing, I went on to ask him how he afforded this now.

“Simple, I finally learned my lesson. Wife number three has limited tastes, and I made them buy me out at top dollar. Too bad, because the company went on to split its stock twice since then.”

“And you were bound by a non-disclosure agreement.”

“Yeah. Look, its a crooked world. I could fight them, and lose, or I could get something that I earned, I earned mind you, and get out.” He still looked uncomfortable with his choice, and I thought I had my man, my pawn.

“How would you like to be the agent of justice against some other thieves?”

He chuckled, and then stopped when he saw I was serious.

“Why?”

“It might help you sleep at night. Or it might quiet that burning inside that a just man feels when confronted with corruption. Think of it as Pepto-bismol for the soul, and probably cheaper than a surgery in a few years.”

He laughed, and then he said in a moment of startling insight.

“Just how old are you?”

My mind went back over the decades that drifted into centuries. I think it was under three centuries, but I was not sure. Then I understood what he was thinking.

“I’m not an angel.”

“But you might have been sent by one.” He replied almost reading my thoughts. If only he had grown up in a different world he would have been a formidable psionic with that acute perception.

“I’ll make you a deal, I’ll tell you what I am, if you help me get these crooks.”

He climbed off his boat, and onto the floating dock to stand in front of me.

“All right, you got a deal.” And he shook my hand.



Taduesz

1: The “Ruthless” story came from a Reader’s Digest piece.