Nivello

 Erimus, the second moon, was rising on their left and Fao, the third moon, was setting on their right.  Between the moons the evening sky was spotted with clouds and the occasional sparkle of a low-orbit satellite.  The sky, normally turquoise during daytime, was shading into purple with red at the edges and the last of the sun was hiding now behind the spires and towers of Lustrous, the capital city of Medthorn.

Jasper squeezed himself into the driver’s seat of the gravity-car, cursing as he twisted this way and that in the plasti-steel seat trying to pull the seatbelt free from beneath himself.  Honoré tsked under her breath and opened the rear door to sit in the back and paused.

“What the hell, Jas?” she said, staring at an animal carrier emblazoned with a logo in red and white that she didn’t recognise.  “This had better not be occupied.”  She put a hand on it to lift it out and something inside lunged against the grille blocking the door, jolting the carrier forward and bumping it against the front passenger seat.  Honoré suppressed a cry of shock and her eyes tightened with annoyance that she’d even let herself be startled.  “Jas?” she said again, trying to put meaning into her tone.

Jasper’s bulk squeaked as he turned in his seat to look over his shoulder.  “Oh that, that’s the wolverine.  Special delivery for Dr. Veille.”

“When you get round to it,” said Honoré.  “Did you feed it?  Is that why it’s trying to take my hand off?  And where am I suppose to sit?”

“Uhhh,” said Jas as he turned back to the controls.  “Huh.  I might have forgotten to feed it today actually.  I’ll do it when we get back.”

“Deliver it already!  Why do you want a half-dead wolverine in the back of your car anyway?”

“I don’t,” said Jasper staring through the windscreen.  “But… well, it’s Dr. Veille.  It’s not like we get on.”

“You’re not to get on her good side by starving her bloody wolverine to death!  And where am I supposed to sit?  You’ve still not answered me!”

“Next to me?”

“Hah!”  Honoré hauled the animal carrier out and pushed it onto the passenger seat next to Jasper, which seemed to agitate the wolverine inside.  It started growling now, a low, throaty noise that made Jasper keep glancing over at it.  His face, naturally jowly and pale, took on a slightly sickly sheen to it and he started sweating.  Behind him Honoré got in the back, her feet crunching on paper and cardboard debris in the floorwell, and sighed heavily.  She slammed her door shut.

“Let’s get going,” she said.  “Ryegate first, then Dr. Veille.  I was rather hoping to get some reading done this evening but that looks like another dream gone up in smoke.”

“What are you reading now?”  Jasper unlocked the controls with his fingerprints and checked the power levels as the dashboard display lit up.  He adjusted the steering column slightly and then gently engaged the antigravity drive.  It whined loudly and the car shuddered momentarily, then there was a stomach-clenching sensation of weightlessness as the whole car became wrapped in a zero-g bubble.  It lifted slowly up into the sky and Jasper focused on the radar display, checking for other sky traffic.  Honoré was saying something about the book she was supposed to be copy-editing but interpreting the two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional sky traffic took up most of Jasper’s concentration.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“I will be when we’re in a sky-lane,” said Jasper, whose brain replayed the last thing Honoré had said when the silence of her not talking got too loud.  The whine of the anti-gravity drive had faded at last and he made a mental note, for at least the fifth time, that he should get the drive serviced.  “Sorry, this is a bit tricky.”  The car shuddered as he engaged the impulse drive to correct their trajectory.

“I thought they did it all themselves?”

“Self-driving gravity-cars got banned last year, Hon,” said Jasper.  “Too many accidents.  Lustrous doesn’t like its residents being scattered over its terraces from a great height.”

“How?  They’re AI driven, right?”

Jasper sighed and tweaked the controls until the radar flashed, indicating that they were in a sky-lane.  He gently eased back on the anti-gravity and increased the impulse speed and the car started moving smoothly through the air.  With that done he relaxed a little.

“AI’s just another name for Expert System,” he said.  “If it was just reacting to what’s around the car it’d be fine.  But all the attempts to make it clever, to have it do what you say when most people can’t even say what they’re thinking… it’s not working.  They’re taking the AI out of everything now.”

“I didn’t understand any of that,” said Honoré.  “How long until we get there?”