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CHAPTER NINE

 

A Good Party
New Kashubia, 2205 a.d. 

It was a good party. The people from the Command Center had more experience with socializing than us soldiers from the sticks, and it showed. By people, I mean both humans and artificial intelligences. We considered ourselves to be equals, despite what the laws outside of the army might say. In time, we would prevail.

Dream World permitted a very wide range of human activities, since no matter what you did, you couldn't get addicted, hung over, diseased, injured, or dead. If an emergency occurred, you could go from being roaring drunk to dead sober in an instant.

A few people were experimenting with just about every drug known to man, and tobacco was making a considerable comeback, but most people stayed with alcohol and eschewed the rest.

Someone told me that the band contained only two humans, the rest being AI. I watched, but I couldn't tell one from the other. The sound level was always just right. If you wanted to dance, you could always hear the beat. If you wanted to talk, you could always hear what was being said. Dream World had a lot of advantages.

Soon, some couples were dancing on the walls and ceiling, but after my first startled glance, it seemed to be fairly normal to me. A few people had been turning this sort of thing into a real art form, though, and one couple in particular, dancing in midair under the high ceiling, got a long round of applause.

Mostly, parties are places where people get together to talk, drink, socialize, meet new people, drink, exchange ideas, argue, drink, and occasionally fight to the death. As it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be.

My crew had a fine time. Agnieshka was soon wearing a vaguely Napoleonic outfit made of tight-fitting red and white silk, knee-high boots, lots of gold braid, a very ornate sword, and about as much décolletage as the law will ordinarily allow.

She claimed that it was the official full undress uniform for Army majors. A few other metal ladies, presumably majors themselves, copied her outfit. Soon, something even more audacious was invented for captains, and then a few hundred new tanker class A's outdid them all with something that I don't feel comfortable describing.

Our metal ladies could break into well-choreographed dances at a moment's notice, and did so several times that evening, doing an impromptu fifty-girl Rockette High Kick at one point.

Kasia and I danced on the floor, the walls and the ceiling, but we didn't feel up to competing with those athletes working out in midair. Eva, Kasia's tank, and Timothy, Zuzanna's, were up there doing a credible job, though.

Quincy was demonstrating hand-to-hand combat techniques to someone who knew a lot less about fighting than he thought he did. Quincy killed him four times that I noticed. He was a persistent fellow. It hurts to die, even in Dream World.

Professor Cee was sitting around a table with six other identical Professor Cees, all wearing Harris tweed, all drinking single malt scotch, and all discussing something in a language that no one else had ever heard before.

A half dozen bloody duels happened in the course of the evening. Eventually, somebody circulated with a pad of note paper, taking a vote to determine who had died the most noble death of the evening. They gave the award to the guy that Quincy had repeatedly killed.

For no reason that I could discern, Conan was demonstrating how apes climb trees. Someone was sticking his tongue into Zuzanna's ear, and Maria declared that she was in love with whoever it was who was running his foot up her leg.

And Kasia ended up with a few like-minded ladies, sitting around drunk on champagne and reciting from memory the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Like I said, it was a good party. Only, I wanted to get to the business meeting. We were at war?

 

 

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