by Jerry
“This is a nice place,” Donna muttered, glancing around. “You used to own it, right?”
“Co-own it, yes,” the dead man replied. “When I was alive, books were on their way out even then. I never understood why. I mean . . . these are books , Donna! You flip open their covers and see copyright dates that say 1921 and 1943 and 1958. The pages are golden like Egyptian papyrus, and scrawled in pencil on the inside covers are prices that read thirty cents! And for that, you get vintage Robert E. Howard and Cordwainer Smith if sci-fi is your thing, or Arnold Toynbee if you adore history, or personal accounts of life in colonial Africa . . . a literary Marrakech forgotten by the Internet, hiding here like something warm-blooded, still—”
Still smelling of odd musk and deepening leaves , Donna thought, remembering his old online post.
“—smelling of odd musk and deepening leaves,” the dead man continued. “As if the books are slowly, slowly trying to turn back into the trees from which their pulpy souls derive.”
Donna stared at him. “Mr. McCue? Was there a reason you asked for this meeting?”
Again, the forehead crease. “I was just making small talk. What happened to your face?”
She didn’t like using admin controls when dealing with clients. It felt rude. But she was still rattled over having nearly been murdered that morning, and now she just wanted to get home, get drunk, and sleep like the dead.
If the dead ever did sleep.
Donna sighed and glanced to her watch. It displayed a Grim Reaper whose scythe rotated to give the time. A joke gift from an ex-boyfriend who, she now reflected, had never been very funny. “Admin override. Request queue.”
Brent froze in place. His image flickered, jumbled, reconstituted itself.
Then the words came spilling out of him, past his personality scaffolding: “This quasint requests that you purchase and deliver a book to a man named Clinton Tan.”
“Clinton Tan,” she muttered, jotting the name down on her datapad while trying to ignore the guilt she felt over the admin pull. “And this book is available here?”
“It is only available here,” Brent said, his reconstructed self quickly asserting itself again. “My old store doesn’t ship anything, so I need it hand-delivered.” He hesitated, blue eyes regarding her as if for the first time. “What happened to your face?”
Ignoring this, she pressed for more detail. He told her it was a blue-colored book, behind the back shelf, and gave her the author’s name. Donna left the table and went to the rear of the store, prodding the brick wall behind the last aisle. After several minutes, she returned to the table, more impatient than ever.
“Brent,” she snapped, “there’s nothing behind the back shelf. I searched and searched and—”
He laughed marvelously. “It’s not behind the back shelf. It’s a book titled Behind the Back Shelf ! In the Literary section.”
Donna blushed. Of course she would have known that, if she had been interacting with the quasint via text. She would have seen the words as an italicized title. Most of her coworkers interacted with quasints as text-only.
But no. Not her.
Because you insist on thinking of them as people , she thought sourly.
She slunk out of her chair. In the Literary section of the Book Traders, she let her fingers alight on peeling book sleeves until she located a blue hard-backed volume. Behind the Back Shelf by S. E. Jennette. Published in 1927.
“That’s the one,” Brent said, materializing beside her, coffee still in hand. If you didn’t formally end the chat, quasints tended to follow you around.
“Great,” Donna muttered, placing the book into her purse to bring to the register. An especially large man was perusing the stacks nearby, and she began to squeeze past him.
To her shock, the man spun around and clasped one beefy hand over her mouth. It happened so fast she was still dazed as her arm was twisted behind her back, and she was forcibly marched through the store’s rear exit, into the rain, into the tiny parking lot.
Into the tan car idling there.
Donna was hardly surprised.
It was just that kind of day.
* * *
The door popped open and Donna was shoved inside. The beefy guy—she saw now it was Detective Alvaro Fitzgerald, New Haven PD—settled in beside her.
“You look like shit, Donna,” a woman’s voice said. “What the hell happened to you?”
Sitting across from her, driver seat rotated 180 degrees to face her, was Rhea Sullivan, campaign manager for Connecticut’s governor-turned-senatorial-aspirant Johnathan Grenier. Rhea possessed blue eyes like chips of ice. Her head was shaved smooth beneath a silver cyberscalp that matched the metallic hue of her business suit.
“Been a rough morning,” Donna muttered, feeling the cut on her forehead leaking a scarlet tear into her eyebrow. “Just trying to survive, Rhea.”
“The governor saw Jasmine’s latest post.”
“The video?”
A vein thumped in Rhea’s forehead. “We’re preparing a lawsuit. A nice media circus around your morbid little establishment.”
“It’s always a circus, Rhea. You’re just the latest clown.”
Lawsuits against Epitaph Incorporated invariably hinged on accusations of libel and slander. A dead husband reminding the world of his ex-wife’s chronic infidelity on the very day she posts news of a new engagement. An unsolved murder victim uploading images of years-long physical abuse at the hands of a boyfriend . . . the same day he lands a new job.
“Your client,” Rhea said softly, “has been dead eight years. Never makes a single deadpost . . . until this week. Why now?”
“Why now?” Donna challenged. “Or what’s next?”
“Jasmine—”
“—must have seen Governor Grenier’s announcement that he’s running for Senate. I guess she keeps a close eye on his career plans, Rhea.”
Rhea’s arctic glare began to show some heat. “What other videos does she have?”
Donna settled back in her seat and sighed. “You mean there’s something worse than showing the eye-capture of a ten-year-old Grenier kicking another child almost to death because he wanted his bike?”
“The video is fake.”
“No, it’s not.”
The campaign manager absently scratched her cyberscalp. “It doesn’t matter, Donna. Grenier issued a statement denying the authenticity of the video. Next, we’ll bring in experts to corroborate. You can barely see his face in the images anyway.”
Donna shrugged. “Then it sounds like you have everything covered.”
Rhea and Detective Fitzgerald exchanged a look. Donna finally noticed that there was a third person in the car, in the front passenger seat. A diminutive, silver-haired fellow with terribly pitted skin, his seat facing forward as if he was quietly watching the rain on the windshield.
Rhea clicked her nails together. “Has Jasmine told you what else she plans to post?”
“No.”
“But you could find out?”
“I could ask her, sure.”
“You could do more than ask. You could access her memorybox.”
“You’re funny, Rhea.”
The campaign manager studied her, letting the silence gather. “So what did happen this morning? Who were all those people attacking you on the subway?”
Donna hesitated. “It was a misunderstanding.”
Detective Fitzgerald made a sharp, dismissive sound—his first real contribution to the conversation. “Yeah, right. I was tailing you this morning, saw the whole goddamn thing. Scary enough that I almost shit myself. You’ve got some crazy clients.”
“They weren’t clients,” Donna said, wanting neither to explain it to them, nor to relive the horror of the morning, the hands grabbing at her, pummeling her. A frenzied crowd was a terrifying thing, like a protean beast of one mind but many fists, feet, eyes, and teeth. If it hadn’t been for subway security guards, they might have killed her. “My clients are a
ll dead,” she added.
Rhea steepled her fingers, as if suppressing her nail-clicking with this posture of severity. The vein in her forehead was a twitching lump. “We want you to convince Jasmine Melius to stop deadposting about the governor.”
Donna sighed and reached for the door. “Listen to me carefully, Rhea, because once I’m done talking, I’m getting out of this car and going home. Here’s Quasint 101 for you: When Jasmine died, everything she had tagged for inclusion was uploaded automatically to her memorybox in orbit. I don’t get to see what’s in there. No one does.”
The campaign manager nodded. “There must be .EXE access commands. Every system has a way in.”
“Don’t know, don’t care, and won’t help.”
“I figured as much.”
For a large man, Detective Fitzgerald was capable of incredible bursts of speed. Donna felt the needle in her neck before she had registered that he had moved at all. The strength in her limbs vanished, as if she was a marionette snipped from its strings. She collapsed face-first to the car’s burnt-orange mat.
Dimly, she was aware of a shape at the window. Donna used the last of her energy to turn her head in that direction.
Standing in the rain outside the car—but not getting wet in the slightest—was the image of Brent McCue mapping out onto her visual field. Still holding his coffee cup.
Watching the proceedings through her eyes.
* * *
She awoke in a moonlit cemetery.
Stone angels bent piteously over memorials and headstones, black marble and engraved epitaphs. Donna realized that someone had laid her across a tomb, and for an instant she felt rocked by the unreality of it all—barrel fires crackling like in some midnight mass, shapes whispering among the graves. A black man with dreadlocks peered into her face.
Donna bolted upright, rolled off the tomb, and staggered backward. “What the hell’s going on?”
“You’re safe,” the man insisted. “You—”
Donna inadvertently stumbled into sensor reach of a nearby headstone. A young man in a Marine’s dress blues materialized in her optics, smiling and giving a crisp salute. Donna hopped back and the memorial faded.
The man with the dreadlocks was still speaking. “You’re in Grove Street Cemetery, just up the road from the bookstore.” Donna touched her neck, remembering the sharp kiss of the needle, and the man indicated with a nod that he had noticed the puncture mark. “You into some bad shit, lady.”
“Just trying to survive,” she muttered. She glanced to the cemetery’s nighttime visitors, wondering how many of the people she was seeing were alive, and how many were quasints conjured from orbit to manifest on the local deadwave. On a whim, she deactivated her optics. Nearly half of the night crowd vanished. The half that remained, the living human beings, continued carrying on conversations, speaking with dearly departed only they could see.
Donna felt her heart relax a notch. “How did I get here?”
“You were dropped off here. I was sent to get you.”
“Sent? By who ?”
By way of answer, the man smiled and pointed to his eye. Taking his meaning, she reactivated her optics.
The dead people rematerialized throughout the cemetery. Families paying their respects. Playing board games together. There was even an elderly woman arguing with a ghost—continuing some age-old debate they had never finished in life (and which it didn’t appear they were going to finish now, either).
A slender shape stepped into the glow of a barrel fire.
Brent McCue.
He was no longer holding his coffee. Grove Street Cemetery was several blocks from his old store, so maybe the distance had instructed his program to discard the mug. Maybe the evening’s chilly temperatures had conjured the atrocious blue-and-silver sweater he now wore.
“Hi, Donna—” he began.
“What in the fuck is going on, Brent?”
“We were still in chat mode when that man grabbed you. Are you okay?”
“She’s okay, Brent,” said the dreadlocked man.
Donna looked from one to the other, living to dead. “How do you two know each other?”
“Brent and I used to own the Book Traders.” The man extended a hand. “Name’s Clinton.”
Donna shook the proffered hand. “Clinton Tan, I take it?” She dug in her purse for Behind the Back Shelf and handed it to him.
Tan accepted the volume, barely glancing at it. Donna didn’t think he looked especially enthralled to be receiving it. And if Brent and he were friends anyway, why the hell couldn’t he have walked in and bought it for himself?
She rubbed her temples. She was too tired, too rattled, to think straight. But something held her in place. A gnawing fear that was rapidly escalating into panic.
Why had Governor Grenier’s thugs knocked her out ?
She dug into her purse for her work badge. Almost immediately, her fingers closed around its sleek shape.
“They scanned it,” Brent said.
Donna shot him a wild look. “My work badge? What else did you see? What did they do to me? What. . . .”
A hideous thought flashed through her head. Not waiting for his reply, Donna ran for the cemetery gates. Pushed them open, wincing from the scream of their ancient hinges.
She accessed her email as she went.
Two messages waited in her inbox.
The first email was from her mother, reminding her not to make cranberries for the family Thanksgiving dinner because she intended to bring them herself.
The second email was from her supervisor at Epitaph Incorporated. Her boss, August Colapinto, was demanding that she call him ASAP. Donna selected him off her speed-dial, fearing the worst, the panic now a feral thing that clawed at whatever remained of her sense of security.
Her boss answered on the first ring. “Donna! Do you know what happened?”
“What happened?” she demanded.
“Jasmine Melius is dead,” he said. “She ended her life.”
* * *
“You’ve been ruffling feathers with your posts,” Donna said.
Jasmine was a startlingly pretty, chestnut-haired woman who had died of bone cancer when she was only thirty-nine. More importantly, she had grown up as next-door neighbors with Johnny Grenier, the boy who would become governor of Connecticut.
“Feathers,” Jasmine repeated, as if tasting the word and finding it sour and unpleasant. “Did I ever tell you what he did to birds he would catch?”
Donna swallowed hard, the brandy she’d been drinking a bitter aftertaste in her throat. “Yes.”
“And possums? And that dog he lured into the trap? He muzzled it and came out every day to watch it suffer and—”
Donna paused the quasint with her admin controls. There was only so much darkness she could let in at any one moment. She took a breath, downed another shot of brandy that scalded her throat, and then unpaused her client to quickly interrupt, “You never called the police? You made all those eye-captures!”
Jasmine’s eyes watered. “The Grenier family was the police. His father was police chief, uncles and brothers all part of the department. Their reach was limitless. Johnny feared nothing in life, but every kid in the neighborhood was terrified of him. Now that I’m dead . . . he can’t hurt me for telling the truth.”
“How many more videos do you have, Jasmine?”
“Several files. I started recording him in secret, promising myself I’d do something to show people what a sick monster he was.” The dead woman was quiet for a while, her eyes faraway on some memory . . . or else buffering within EI’s personality scaffolding. “Johnny can’t be allowed to continue a political career,” she said at last, as if to herself. “To have that level of power and influence. It can’t happen, Donna.”
Donna shrugged. “Politicians are all liars and thieves, as far as I’m concerned.”
“But they’re not all monsters, Donna.”
“Depends on what you—”
<
br /> “No, it doesn’t depend!” Jasmine shouted. The reconstruction program conducted some behind-the-scenes calculus and turned the quasint’s face crimson, doing a pretty convincing impression of blood rushing into her features.
Berated by dead people, Donna thought. I need to spend more time with the living. Except who do I hang out with who’s actually alive? My boss? I can’t stand that philandering fucker.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last.
Jasmine’s color returned to normal and she managed a nervous smile. It was always the same smile, because Jasmine had never really smiled for pictures. At the time of her death, when all her files were uploaded to Epitaph, there was only a single photo of her smile. It had been a birthday party. Little Jasmine was wearing a paper crown.
Donna said, “Grenier’s campaign manager has been paying me visits. I just want you to know that you’re making enemies.”
“He can’t stop me, right?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you sure?”
* * *
Around the Epitaph Incorporated office, they called it cybercide.
It was predicated on the UN agreement that quasi-intelligences had the right to self-terminate. They possessed enough complexity and Turing-vetted pseudo-sentience that the matter had come to the highest courts; a nasty and nightmarish ad campaign on the part of the Electronic Rights Foundation had shown a virtual child in a prison cell, screaming and battering at the wall as a ticker in the corner showed the years scrolling by, alongside the words: NO ONE SHOULD BE INCARCERATED FOR ETERNITY.
Ending one’s existence, therefore, had become an inalienable right.
The logistics were simple. All collected sub-files that constituted a digital-soul would undergo a total deletion, along with every backup and the reconstructed personality’s source code.
Donna’s anguish was condensing into molten rage as she hurried from Grove Street Cemetery into the autocab she’d called. She slipped into its backseat. Her boss was still on the phone, and she shouted at him, “How the fuck did this happen, Augie?”
Her employer’s face loomed large through his wrist-line. “Jasmine sent a formal request to the technical support queue at 6:53 p.m. last night. Our techs waited the standard six hours and then processed the order. The order originated with her memorybox. There was no outside interference.”