“How the hell do I get the robot-cleaners to work?” Mom called out. “Did your nan ever show you?”
When I came out, I found her peering down at the house console behind the entrance to the kitchen.
“What’s the point, Mom?”
“A clean house before…” she stopped herself short.
“—A clean mind. I know,” I said finishing it for her.
I was getting freaking teary eyed again.
She frowned as she watched the little bright green domes buzz uselessly to and fro without cleaning a thing.
“I suppose it’s amazing they go at all,” she muttered.
She fiddled with the controls and looked up again.
“There, I’ve got them going again,” she said. “See? Everything is still working.”
“Good one, Mom.”
“Let’s sit down at the table and have this cup of tea,” she said.
I watched her wash cups in the sink, listening to her whistle tunelessly, the way she always did when busying herself while thinking through a problem.
6
DNA
She took a long sip from her cup.
“You are not drinking your tea,” she said quietly.
“You hit that nurse in the face like you were a regular street fighter,” I said.
She smiled and took another sip.
“Poor girl.”
“Mom? I’ve never seen you do anything like that before.”
“Of course not.”
“You changed into…”
“A street fighter?” Mom asked looking at me with a raised eyebrow.
“My champion,” I replied with a laugh.
We giggled, spilling our tea on Nan’s prized wooden topped table.
“It wasn’t a fair fight,” Mom said, wiping the tears from eyes. “Oh, dear, it does feel good to laugh though, doesn’t it?”
As soon as she said the words, she was laughing all over again.
I swear I had never seen her like this before. It wasn’t so much a different side of her personality. It was like she was a different woman to the one I had known my whole life.
She saw the expression on my face.
“Oh, come on. This isn’t the most shocking thing that’s happened to us today by a mile.”
“I’ve just never seen this side of you,” I told her.
“Of course not, but just so you know. I am so thankful they put you back together as good as new. And do you know what I’m really happy about? I was able to get that implant out. By now they know you have had one, but they won’t have it or the information it carried about your father. My stomach acid is making a mess of the data as I speak.”
“What aren’t you telling me about Dad, Mom?”
“I wasn’t always the woman you thought you know, Atoma. Once I had a relationship with a terrorist,” she told me. “The state forgave me, but only because they needed my knowledge and skills. And, no doubt, coming from a thoroughly bourgeois family as I did, also helped me stay out of prison.”
“You were going out with a terrorist? You, Mom? That’s very hard to believe.”
“Your father.”
“Dad was a terrorist?”
“Not Simon, but I’m getting to that.”
“And what did kind of family did you say you came from?”
“The bourgeois is an elite layer of people in civilized society who own all the banks and the factories and so on, dear.”
Well, that’s my snobby Mom for you. You can take the teacher out of teaching, but you can’t take the lecturer out of the professor, or however the adage goes.
“I still can’t believe you punched out a nurse,” I told her, suddenly overwhelmed by the questions but not really wanting to hear the answers. It felt as though my whole life was threatened by what she was going to tell me next.
“Well, I did surprise myself today,” Mom said, nodding her head as she thought about it. “Then again, she asked me to hit her.”
“Mom, you’ve always been quiet, and just a little bit of a control freak. You know it.”
She nodded and sighed. “Assertive, yes, but never violent. There are a lot of things about me you don’t know. Such a lot I must tell you, but now I’ve run out of time.”
“Like how come I’m not human, you mean?”
Mom put her arm around me.
Well, that was new too! The last time I remember her putting an arm around me was when I came back from elementary school in tears after a scraggy fight with a bully girl.
I rested my head on her shoulder.
Mom was feisty and handy with her fists, and now she was on the run from the law. She was the kind of mother I always wanted.
I could hear the urgency in her voice and knew she was doing her best to still the tremor I could see in her hand.
“We should run Mom. We should leave the city.”
“It’s too late for that,” she said with the same wan smile she gave me before. “The chance for running was years ago. I am sure I’ve been on a watch list ever since they jailed Conrad.”
“Conrad?”
Mom nodded her head.
“Yes, Conrad Yoshida. Even if he and I had run, we wouldn’t have gotten very far. They monitor everything you do through the Bricard. Every purchase tells them where you are as well as what you’re buying and how much you’re spending. We are all nodes on the Blockchain. Remember that.”
“Except for me,” I reminded her. “I can’t be on the Blockchain if I can never have my own Bricard, can I?”
“Everyone except for you, dear,” she said with a sad smile. “One day you will be on it again. You are too smart to be sent off to work in a re-education camp. A fucking gulag!”
Mom had never used the f-bomb in front of me before. Somehow though, hearing her use it now for the first time I was not shocked.
“Mom, I don’t mind not being human,” I told her.
“You are so-so human, Atoma. And I should know, I’m your mother.”
“But I’m not human in the eyes of the law, right?”
“Blame your father,” she said.
She rubbed her eyes and suddenly looked very tired.
Her blond hair peppered with gray falling about her face.
“There’s so much I haven’t told you,” she said finally. “I kept telling myself that it was better I wait until after your CCD. You know how they tell you that is when they extract information they need to create your unique bio-identity? They say they combine it with the DNA sample they have on file from your birth. They tell you that information is loaded onto a new Bricard you can use to live in the civilized world.”
“Everyone looks forward to their own Bricard,” I said, nodding my head.
“Because you buy things with it, and talk to your friends with it,” Mom said.
“And watch lots of holovids,” I told her with a shrug. I didn’t watch them a lot myself, not unless I was wanting to learn how to do something.
“They are the sugar coating,” she told me. “The bitter pill is the small sweet cookie they give you with a tiny cup of juice.”
“The celebration meal,” I said, and I managed a smile. “Yes, I’ve heard it’s the sweetest cookie ever. So sweet that I would probably spit it out.”
“Guess what they are really feeding you.”
I stared at her.
“Oh, come on. What is it?”
“Guess,” she urged.
“Okay. A drug that will turn me into a good citizen.”
“Hundreds of thousands of bits of nanobots,” Mom told me, grabbing my hands. “The signals coming through the electrodes they put on your head later assemble the pieces into functioning bots that are programmed to copy themselves. Once the bots have reached a critical number, they move to your brain and attach themselves to specific areas. This is many steps up from giving you a drug. This a behavior modification program of a whole other kind.”
“None of the sixteen-year-olds in my grade beha
ved much different from how they did before the ceremony,” I told her.
“It’s subtle, dear. It makes you easier to influence without making you stupid. It’s the price of being in the Blockchain and getting free stuff.”
“They would have found out about me.”
“The implant in your back would have covered you for your CCD at City Hall.”
“How come I’m not considered a human?” I blurt out finally.
She dropped her voice.
“You have a father you have never met.”
“Conrad?” I ask already knowing that it is.
“Yes.”
“Conrad-the-terrorist is my real father?”
“That’s his DNA you carry, yes.”
“And what about Dad, ah, I mean Simon?”
“Simon’s been your father all your life, and he loves you.”
I guess my mouth dropped open at that point.
Mom just carried on speaking faster and faster. As if she knew a voice was about to tell her that her time was up. She was going to have her story done before I fell off my chair from the shock of hearing it.
“Conrad and I went our separate ways before you were born. I mean—after you were conceived. I don’t think he even knows about you. He was a targeted as a political activist and arrested and charged for a crime against the Corporation. They canceled his Bricard then they struck him from the Blockchain, making him a Zero. So he was no longer legally a human.”
“But why does that make me a Zero too?” I asked.
Mom looked miserable.
“It’s a punitive law. Anyone who is deemed a threat to Earth Incorporated is punished by having their status as a legal human stripped from them. That status entitles us to use the centralized Blockchain. When they delisted your father’s DNA, they automatically delisted yours as well. The punishment is extended to their descendants. It’s better than being sentenced to death.”
“Not by much!” I cry out. “It’s still positively feudal!”
Mom nodded her head.
“Yes, it’s a terrible punishment. Because the Blockchain doesn’t recognize Conrad or you have any human rights, you can’t by default buy anything. It will be impossible to exist in a city unless you are under the care of someone with a Bricard.”
“That’s insane!” I scream.
Mom reached across and placed her hands over my clenched fists.
“You must calm down,” she said. “It’s insane, yes, but it’s also logical. This is the kind of world we live in. I wanted you to be a part of it—”
“A part of it?” I cry out. “I can’t even go to school!”
I looked at her face and I suddenly realized that not being able to continue with my studies would be the least of my problems. I was angry with Mom, and angry with my real dad too, and since I didn’t know Conrad, I felt doubly angry with Mom. But, that wasn’t going to do any good. So, I took a deep breath.
“How come they didn’t find me out when I was born?”
“I was very careful. I gave birth at home and soon after I placed the implant in you. There were never any awkward questions. No officials suspected a thing.”
“Ellie and Tyler are Dad’s children?”
Mom gave me a sad smile.
“They are your brother and sister. Never forget you have a family. Simon has been a good father to you all.”
I snuffled as I realized how much I wanted to see them and suddenly finding myself trying my hardest not to burst into tears, I nodded my head.
“I was pregnant with you before I married Simon,” she said. “He didn’t mind. He loved me.”
“What happened to Conrad?”
“He’s a prisoner in a gulag, a prison camp for dissenters. They like to call them re-education camps, but how do you study when doing hard labor.”
She gazed at me and suddenly the years seemed to fall over her like a veil and she seemed looked older.
“He has been re-educated for almost half his life. Since the day you were born.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“There is no story to tell. Conrad was an activist, but he didn’t blow anything up or hurt anyone. It didn’t matter. They broke the front door down and arrested him. They were convinced he was a terrorist. He was tried in front of a single military judge without a jury, found guilty of associating with a terror group, and thrown in prison.”
7
Stillness
“Why have you not taken me to see Conrad?”
“He doesn’t know you exist.”
“You never thought to tell him you had his child?”
“Of course I did. Conrad believed in a future that was completely different from the one we have now. It’s very dangerous to hold beliefs different to those they teach us to embrace.”
“I am going to find out where he is and introduce myself.”
“One day, yes, you should do that.”
“What’s going to happen to us, Mom?”
“By now, they have made the connection between your father and me. I will be labeled as a supporter of a known terrorist network. Because I work for the government at one of the high-level research facility in this part of the world, they will probably accuse me of spying for the terrorists. That will be treason.”
“Mom, we need to find somewhere to hide?”
I knew it was hopeless, but I could not face the awful truth even though that was exactly what Mom wanted me to do.
“We might as well be dangerous animals on the loose in the city,” she whispered. “They are coming for us, and that’s all there is to it.”
Mom squeezed my hand.
“Don’t worry. They won’t hurt you.”
“But what if they hurt you? If they take you away, will I see you again?”
“Of course you will,” she told me.
I know Mom’s lying for my sake.
“You must do exactly as they tell you. This is the only way.”
A strange stillness had settled over the house. The sound of insects in the overgrown garden outside had ceased and the quietness was deafening.
Mom looked around the room.
“The robots have powered down.”
She pointed at one of the bright pink and green discs that had settled near the kitchen door.
“The things are ancient, Mom. They don’t last forever.”
“No, they’ve all stopped,” she said, gazing around the room. “That means the burn-box isn’t working.”
I felt Grandma’s antique kitchen tabletop vibrating under the palms of my hands.
Mom turned to me, opening her mouth to cry out a warning.
I knew in that instant, no matter how much I wished it to be otherwise, everything changed forever.
A shaft of white light cut straight through the ancient wood of the closed entrance door. Mom’s eyes widened and she called my name, but she had no chance to say anything more.
There was a pop and Mom slumped across the table.
A curl of smoke rose from the perfectly round hole made by the laser exiting the back of her head. I watched the wisp spiral upward even as the black uniforms crashed through the door.
“Mom!”
They were all over me in seconds. I tried to launch myself from the chair, but my hands were already cuffed behind my back and I was yanked back.
I watched a woman pull a body bag over my mother and seal the top, and just like that, Mom was gone forever.
I felt a jab in my neck and my legs collapsed under me.
The moment before I fell into the deep well of nothingness I realized my life was over.
8
Memory Adjustment
The black Guardian wagon turned into the garage below the dark glass tower in the west side of town. Officially, the distinctive tower was the Chicago’s Guardian Station, unofficially it was the Rack Shop, or less colorfully and more commonly among bad people as the G-Shop.
Dad always said the G-Shop was the one place you don�
�t want to have to use your Bricard. The constant stream of black uniforms moving in and out of the building might have accounted for the names it was called, more likely though it was the continual flow of protestors through the doors they labeled as terrorists. If they were unlucky, they left the facility in a prison shuttle, and if they weren’t so lucky… well, I shudder to imagine.
There was nowhere to run now except into the sanctuary of madness.
At the Station, I was left in a cell that was far too shiny and white, and with a bright light that was never turned off. Time inside the tiny space stood still. Was it a day, a night, a week, or a month? It was the sedative that made things weird, and they kept giving me more.
Then it came to an end when I found myself on a stretcher in an ambulance. Or was I inside a shuttle? Right way up, or upside down, I couldn’t tell. The world itself was crazy, it wasn’t me that was mad at all. That much I knew for sure.
“What’s so funny?” The muscular uniformed woman sitting next to me asked.
“My mom is dead, and it turns out my dad is not my dad,” I told her. It seemed funny, and I laughed.
“We haven’t got far to go,” she told me and paid me no more attention.
Words intended to comfort me. She didn’t want to be stuck inside the back of the prisoner wagon with someone losing their mind after all.
I looked down at the thin metal cuffs on my hand. There wasn’t much damage I could do even if I did turn stark raving ripping-out-the-walls-of-my-cage mad.
The vehicle stopped outside the entrance to a huge ornately decorated building. The kind of stone building that had cupid statues blowing trumpets and stone gargoyles grimacing over the entrance. A prison for non-human criminals? It didn’t look like any I could have imagined. My escort led me to an office, sat me in a chair, and stood silently beside me, waiting for something to happen.
Atoma and the Blockchain Game Page 3