P: Insufficient Evidence

Brendan was finding it harder to concentrate on his classes than usual. For a moment he seriously considered running away from home.

He'd actually done it once when he was younger, and despite the constant complaints about the monitoring systems spread throughout the Eks Corp Central region, it hadn't actually been that difficult. He'd learned a lot more about the power of money in 48 short hours than he ever had from his father or, ironically, from his hereditary memory library.

He'd also learned that just having information was not the same as being able to use it. But right now, he felt like he could really use more information. It was just that the information he was being given in this class was utterly irrelevant to the questions that were worrying him.

Running away might give him access to more information. It might take him out of the equation and ruin whatever scheme was dancing around the race he'd crafted. It might do those things, but it would definitely make him look like a kid who didn't know what he wanted from life, who had caused a fuss and then run away from his duties.

If he knew for certain that it would reveal whatever plot was currently in motion, he wouldn't really care what it made him look like, but there was a chance that it would only help the scheme that he would rather foil. Running away was too chancy. But maybe so was sticking to his usual routine.

He considered the coded message he'd received from his sister. Maybe coded was an exaggeration, only three words had been written in the siblings private code. 'Bypass Tori Point.' The uncoded portion had pointed out that none of the silly qualifications he'd given his 'Princess Race' prevented his own sister from entering it.

That was actually a rather scary idea to contemplate, not for any old fashioned reasons like inbreeding, but because it made him realize how little he actually knew about her. Did she want to be the Queen like their mother? Did she actually want to be the King? If she did, he wished that they could swap roles.

Their family structure was rather like a set of chess pieces.

The King was at the center, subjected to public scrutiny for the entire 50 PiYears of his term. If you wanted to, you could even find out what the king had eaten for breakfast on any given day. Some people even had their service units prepare the same breakfast for them each day, which was disturbing on several levels.

The Queen was free to go anywhere her whim took her. Brendan vividly remembered sitting at a table that was too high for him to do more than peep over the edge, in a crowded place with wild music and people with bright green hair dancing on a raised surface. His memory library had indicated that it was probably a dangerous place, but she had told him not to mention anything from his memories, and his memories had agreed. His memory also told him that the Queen was equally dangerous.

His siblings were more like bishops or rooks. They always appeared to move in straight lines. Until his position as the heir had been publicly revealed, either of them might have been the next king as far as the people of the solar system knew. Neither of them had ever indicated any desire to take his place, that he knew of.

Maybe Adrian was right when he mocked the corporate royals for tying their inheritance structure to their genetic inheritance.

--

Brendan had to ask the station system where Tori Point was, other than somewhere in the solar system. It was one of the Lagrangian points along the orbit of the outermost of the three inhabited planets. The course he'd designed didn't go anywhere near it, and he was almost tempted to change that. Almost.

He was very curious about what was out there, and what his sister knew about it, but he didn't ask, even in code, when he replied to his sister. Instead he asked: "Are you hinting that I should provide a ship so that you really can enter?"

Her reply was delayed, but filled with sisterly scorn: "If I wanted to enter such a silly event, I wouldn't need your help."

There were more uniformed figures in the corridors than usual when he made his way up to his workshop near the docks. Their eyes tended to identify and then dismiss him, so he assumed that they were there for his protection, since it was unlikely that so many different people would be able to consistently hide their interest in their target.

When he arrived at his workshop, he wasn't sure what to work on. The little ship was ready. It was fully stocked and could launch as quickly as a course could be registered with the traffic system. He'd already taken it on a few quick test jaunts around the school's station.

He could grab a suit and go at any time if he wanted to. Except, he couldn't, because he was the prince. Maybe he'd chosen to use a race as the way to meet his future bride because he was hoping that she would understand this feeling.

To give himself something to do, he connected the little ship's core system to the station's core system, and transferred his private files, his school files, and basically everything that he would take with him if he were going to run away and avoid connecting to any public systems for an extended period of time. Then he shut down the ship's connection and began creating a new file, like the one he was building in his own memory library.

The publication of his race had been presented to his father as a trivial routine item. It was hardly an important affair, in his own judgement, but it was by its very nature a very public affair. It might have been an accident of a filing system, but it might have a purpose that neither of them could place, since Brendan himself was the most likely suspect.

A number of top tier corporations were pushing their connections to use the publicity around his 'Princess Race' to their own benefit. That was very predictable. The normalcy of it all was actually rather reassuring.

Almost every large corporation had at least one girl in their core family who fell into the eligible ranges he'd given. That had actually surprised him a little, until Adrian had pointed out that even if he'd been choosing his wife in the usual manner, they would all have a candidate ready. Most of them also had a younger man near his sister's age as well.

He and Adrian had joked about the potential profits available in the small luxury ship industry during the registration period, but it was actually creating a very real bubble in that industry. However, Brendan couldn't see any sign that any particular manufacturer had been more prepared for the burst of activity than the others.

When he finished adding all of the potentially connected, but quite likely completely unrelated data, he considered for a moment and then added two more things.

There was something at Tori Point, and it was either dangerous or secret.

The last thing was that a small but successful corporation called SkyWater had recently suffered the loss of their primary freighter, and not a single piece of the freighter itself had been found, only some of its cargo. Adrian had made wild speculations about microscopic black holes and other mostly fictional variants of rifts in space.

Brendan had adjusted the course to avoid the region where the outer traffic system had lost track of it. He included it in the file, because despite their reported financial hardship, the corporation had registered three girls. Two of whom were recently adopted Donatellas from their core family, while the other was listed simply as Cinderella from the cinder sector, and didn't yet have a ship registered.

The messy dissolution of the far larger Donatella family corporation a generation or two earlier was part of his genetic memory library. They had been devoured by several other top tier corporations. All of the families involved were old. They had bought places on the colony ships that Eks Corp had sent to claim the system. They had been founding families.

Families like that laid long plans.

Families like his.

Most of them also embedded algorithms for calculating the flow of events in their children. Brendan was a rather lazy example. He set the little ship's experimental core to do the calculations for him. He expected that the result would be the same one his own estimations gave him: Insufficient data.