Outrageous Fortune-Errant Freight Book One

Chapter 14

"I'm sorry," Rory said, holding up one hand, as if in school. "A what again?"

"Calculator," Eitan repeated. "A machine used on ancient Earth for advanced mathematics."

"Like an arithmometer?"

"Only in the same sense the Errant is like a weather buoy," Eitan told Rory. "But look." With a rattling of cutlery, he shoved aside the plates he'd emptied and leaned his left arm on the table while his right hand pointed to the device. "On the Earth-made calculator, these keys allowed the user to perform advanced computations, not only multiplication or divisions but also statistics, probabilities, exponential functions."

"And I bet that would be impressive if I understood what half of it means."

"It means," John said to Jagati as Eitan straightened, "we have a problem."

"Why?" Her glare shifted to the captain's. "Because knowledge is power and power corrupts?"

"I've always thought that was bollocks," Rory said, cracking his neck. "Three days," he reminded everyone as they turned their glares in his direction. "Three days hunched over a tri-level Kairos."

"We get it," Jagati said. "You're a miracle worker. A genius. A god among dodgers."

"I was na' asking for—"

"We have a problem," John cut in, bringing them back on point, "because this kind of tech is outlawed."

"But Apian Law only forbids advanced tech," Jagati said. "Computers, artificial intelligence, programmable weaponry. It doesn't say a thing about fancy adding machines."

Eitan looked up to see her glaring at the machine, arms crossed over her chest. Next to her, Rory wore his trademark expression of fascination while his fingers twitched at his side. As if, Eitan thought, they itched to get a hold of the calculator and learn what it could do—and then crack it open to see how it did it.

Both viewpoints were equally dangerous, as neither took into account what they were looking at.

"Believe me," he said to them, with a short nod towards John, "this is precisely what the Apian laws speak of. These buttons?" He pointed to three that read HEX, OCT and BIN in turn. "These represent three numerical systems the Earthers used to create computer code. Primitive, compared to what our ancestors had available to engineer and colonize Fortune, but..." He withdrew his hand and looked at John. "You are right to be concerned. If anything, you are not worried enough. The mere knowledge of such a device is forbidden. I don't care to imagine what might befall anyone the Keepers found in possession of an operating model." He glanced at Rory. "A stint in the Barrens would be the soft option."

"Which begs the question," John drew Eitan's attention back, "given those prohibitions, how did you come to see these designs in the first place?"

"I—" He paused, rubbed at his beard with the stump, and said, "I learned about them at university."

"Chandrasekhar offers a course on illegal tech?" Jagati's skepticism was impossible to miss.

"Trudeau required a term on the ethics of Earth technologies," John told her.

"As did Chandrasekhar." Eitan nodded. "But this was something different."

"Different how?" Jagati asked.

"During my fourth term I became involved with a group with technocrist leanings. They were interested in expanding on the university's teachings, as they believed Fortune's children deserved full access to Earth's technological legacy."

"And?" Jagati prompted when he hesitated.

"These students were in contact with an underground archivist who had in his possession the design specifications of several Earth-made devices."