The Future, Imperfect: Short Stories

by Ruth Nestvold

  Dane shrugged. "Why should they find me when they haven't found Tyrie and her troops? Don't worry, we'll be okay until you send someone down to get us."

  "Damn." She looked away, and he thought he saw a hint of tears in her eyes. Tears for him now.

  "I've got a wrist unit, remember," he said, lifting his hand and jiggling his arm. "And thanks to me, Marie's got the technology to contact me." He was trying to keep the tone light, but it was hard. Dane thought of the moment of madness in his armored car, of Leah's lips against his, and part of him wanted nothing more than to follow her through the land of rock and no water, away from the land where the thread of civilization was broken.

  "Stay safe, Dane," she said, stepping forward to give him a quick, hard hug.

  "I will."

  The sun on the pavement was hot, the heat drifting up and swirling around, enclosing them, a cocoon. He searched her face, unsure of what he found there. There was a sheen of sweat on her upper lip. He could see the individual beads, glistening among the fine, dark down. Her tongue touched her lower lip and disappeared, and his stomach muscles clenched in answer. He wasn't glad she was going, but he knew he couldn't be with her anymore.

  At an unexpected clap of thunder, they jumped and laughed nervously. Dane turned, noticing for the first time the dark clouds on the horizon. At least there might be water on the long drive back, a drive where otherwise there was only dust and rock and the sandy road.

  "Wait," Dane said and went to the back of the car. He'd almost forgotten the transgen spores he'd smuggled out of the corporate zones; spores that could germinate even in dust.

  He pulled the case out, flicked open the fastenings, and took out one of the jars. Leah had followed him and now stood at his shoulder. Tyrie left the children other children and joined them.

  "We were never able to deliver these," he said, opening the lid and shaking the contents out over the dust on the side of the road. "Maybe you can distribute the rest on the way north."

  Leah smiled. "Johnny Appleseed."

  "Who's Johnny Appleseed?" Tyrie asked.

  Dane laughed. "Just a fictional hero, Tyrie."

  Leah lifted one of the jars out of the case. "Yes," she said, the intensity he loved so much back in her eyes. "The Purists seem to control the water sources. If these spores do what they're supposed to do, flourish in a dry land, then at least those who want to escape their influence will have a chance."

  "Hope in a handful of dust."

  She raised her eyes to his again, and the way she looked at him made his gut wrench, hard. This time, he knew what he saw there.

  Dane looked away. He could say goodbye now, but not completely. Not ever completely.

  END

  Shadow Memory

  David cleared his throat. "We've got a problem."

  Kenna nodded, looking out the office window past her boss's shoulder. Summer smog hung over Seattle like an old blanket, a muffling mass of thin grayness. From her chair, all she could see was gray air — no lakes or mountains, not even the skyline. "And that is?"

  "We've lost a morph unit. Stolen, most likely. We want you to take on another field job to find it for us."

  She clutched her hands together in her lap. "But I don't do jobs as a morph agent anymore. I'm in research now."

  "I think you should reconsider," he said, folding his hands together deliberately.

  "And if I don't?"

  "We will have to terminate your contract."

  Kenna pinched the bridge of her nose, silent. If she had to leave the company, she'd lose her corporation ID. And if she lost her ID, she would have to give up her house in the corporate zone and move to the burbs. Her license to live the protected life wasn't being revoked, but in order to keep it, she would have to do something she'd sworn never to do again.

  "Why me?" She gazed at David across the glittering expanse of desk. "There are lots of agents who love morphing, risk or no risk."

  "The missing morph unit is one you worked with frequently while you were active, so it has quite a bit of your shadow memory. According to our records, only Max worked with it more."

  Max. Kenna started out of her seat and strode over to the floor-to-ceiling picture windows. From here, downtown and Elliott Bay were visible to the west and the hills to the south, the picture muted by clouds and overlaid with a faint reflection of herself, a slash of black suit, lanky limbs, long bangs.

  She wouldn't cry. She never had and she wouldn't now. Max's death was the reason she'd given up morphing, given up the excitement of industrial espionage and gone into research. That was a year ago. A year since she had seen his quirky grin or unbraided his autumn-colored hair, smooth as sunlight beneath her hands. Kenna did her best to avoid thinking about him, and she thought about him all the time.

  She turned away from the view, leaning her left shoulder casually against the glass. "How is shadow memory from me supposed to help?"

  "If the thieves have managed to activate the morph, it may display some of your mannerisms, something familiar which will make it easier for you to identify it."

  "Like what?"

  David shrugged. "The way you throw your bangs out of your face, your sarcastic expression. You're the one who's the specialist on the effects of shadow memory. Come up with something."

  Kenna glanced back out the window. Past those hills were the ruins of the burbs. "What about the danger of brain drain? I didn't have that much time left when I quit."

  "Our calculations indicate you still have over seven hundred hours before you reach the limit mandated."

  Seven hundred hours before she was in imminent danger of identity scramble. But they weren't giving her much choice.

  She walked across the gray plush carpet and returned to her chair. "Do you have any leads on where I'm supposed to find this morph unit?"

  The shadow of a smile passed across David's respectable features and disappeared again. "Good girl. We think the morph was taken by a group of tech terrorists in the burbs. They've been responsible for several thefts of hi-tech devices recently."

  Kenna was almost tempted to laugh. She was taking this job to avoid ending up in the burbs, and that was precisely where they were sending her. "What if they weren't the ones who stole the morph?"

  "We need to learn more about them anyway. Your job will be to infiltrate their group, gather information, and try to find the unit."

  She nodded. She didn't like it, but she'd do it. All she had to lose was her mind. But the alternative was losing her identity.

  * * * *

  The small changing room was white and the air sterile: not the sterile of a hospital with its biting smell of antiseptic and disinfectant, but a more purely sterile near-nothingness, kept that way through the intelligent monitoring equipment. Kenna stripped, slipped on the white shift laid out on the only chair, and entered the lab proper.

  The lab itself was perhaps three times as large as the changing room, much of the space taken up with two beds surrounded by gleaming equipment. Kenna sat down on the edge of the one equipped with the life-support system.

  "Back into the field, huh?" the tech assistant said, fitting the cap over her head for the brain download.

  "Yup."

  As he adjusted the download cap, Kenna felt a prickle of anticipation despite herself. On the second bed next to the transferral unit was the long, unassuming box with its infrared datalink field which would become her corporeal home for as long as it took to complete her assignment. Of course, it wasn't really a box — it was a high-tech neural network built into a DNA matrix, the very latest in assembler technology.

  "Okay. Lie down and close your eyes." He hooked her up to the life-support system which would keep her body alive after her mind left it. The case closed around her.

  Some people talked about out-of-body experiences, but they didn't know what it was really like, the state of being pure mind, a data packet going from brain to transferral unit to neural network. Stripped of excess baggage, mortal
flesh and bone, moving between a body and a box. She knew the exact moment the upload to the morph unit had been completed, but she waited for the tech to give her the word.

  "Transferral successful. Proceed with DNA code feed."

  In the processor which had become her mind, she called up the basic human DNA code and fed it to the morph unit while the tech monitored progress on his screen. Slowly, she began to acquire sensation again; she could feel the box expanding and stretching, mass shifting until she acquired limbs, a mouth, eyes. The bed unit was cool beneath her back, absorbing excess heat from the morphing process.

  "Anthropomorphing successful," the tech said. "Proceed with appearance adjustment."

  She visualized the image and physical details of the young man she would play, and the unit responded, growing dark hair on her head and a smattering on her chest, giving her height, but not too much to appear threatening. She felt a tickle in her groin and an itch on her face as her penis and facial hair took shape.

  "Morph process complete," he announced. "Okay, Kenna, you can get up now."

  She sat up slowly and dangled her bare legs over the edge of the bed, looking over at her real self on the other bed. She'd forgotten the surreal quality of this moment, her body lying dead to the world, while she sat next to it. Despite her reluctance to take the job, she found herself savoring the freedom morphing gave her, the ability to change at will into anything she had the data for, image and DNA files.

  Or rather, change at will until she lost so much shadow memory that her mind went with it.

  * * * *

  From the window of the fast train, Kenna gazed south across the calm waters of Lake Washington in the direction of the burbs. She'd never been there and never wanted to go. Years ago, driving home with Max from a trip to Vancouver, she'd seen a destroyed stretch of the highway wall south of the corporate zone of Everett. Beyond, she'd caught a glimpse of boarded-up, run-down buildings and overgrown streets between the tanks of the security forces acting as a temporary replacement for the wall. She was glad to be driving on the opposite side of the freeway from the gap between her protected life and the burbs.

  Max had turned around to stare behind them, while she drove south, to Seattle and safety.

  Despite her insulated life, she'd considered herself adventurous. Then danger caught up with them and she realized she had regarded her job like a vacationer who did high risk adventure sports, assuming there would always be a net to catch her. The adrenaline rush made her feel alive, and the possibility of death didn't exist.

  Now Max was dead. And she finally knew what danger meant.

  The lake shimmered in the bright summer sun. The train sped over the bridge, humming smoothly.

  In the Bellevue corporate zone, she hired an armored car to take her to Factoria, in the middle of the lawless area between the zones of Renton and Bellevue. No trains stopped there, no corporate security patrolled the streets, and the houses were sagging where they stood, the paint peeled away and the windows broken. It looked as bad as she expected.

  The hired car let her off at Factoria Square, a crumbling former shopping mall where the local burb bosses held court. It was a sprawling, windowless building, drab and worn, the facade faded and cracked. The big double doors were reinforced and flanked by burb militia in dark jeans and rain jackets, black berets on their heads and holsters slung low on their hips. As she paid the driver, acidic Puget Sound rain was gently coating the buildings. She pulled the protective raincoat tighter around her young male body.

  Power structures in the burbs were informal, but they were far from non-existent. The burb boss she talked to was a bear of a man, with a barrel chest, a graying brown beard, and a twinkle in his hazel eyes. He introduced himself as Gabe.

  "Don't try squatting alone," he suggested, typing her fictional name into a database with an old-fashioned keyboard. "Tender corp scrub like you."

  Kenna tossed her head, but there were no long bangs for her to throw. "Corp scrub? Not me. The corporations can go to hell in hyperdrive, for all I care."

  A woman behind Gabe was staring at her intently, her eyes narrowed. She didn't look familiar, but there was too much intimacy in her gaze.

  A younger man wandered over. "There's a room free in our casa. You got units left?"

  Kenna turned her attention to him gratefully. "Had to trade them for dollars."

  "Still official currency," he said, grinning and holding out his hand. "Name's Sebastian."

  She shook hands. "Ken."

  Kenna soon found work in a shop repairing armored cars. There and in the dilapidated cafés and bars lining the pot-holed streets, at the house with the boarded-up windows she shared with Sebastian, Josh, and Miguel, she told tales of bitterness toward the corporations and wasted expertise in bioengineering.

  Their house was much nicer inside than out. On the street-side it resembled a run-down fortress in the middle of a war zone, but in the back the windows had been replaced. The nearby houses were occupied, and neighbors helped each other in patrolling the streets and putting up high fences to keep thieves from breaking in and taking what little they had built for themselves.

  But it didn't have any of the tech Kenna was used to: no network, no wall screen, no house computer. She felt like she'd lost her best friend. And no one could go anywhere here without a weapon, not like in the corporate zones, where weapons were forbidden except for security personnel. Corpses of burned-out vehicles lined the streets, and beyond the gated community where she lived stretched the shells of abandoned homes.

  One evening during a break in the summer showers, Sebastian and Kenna were sitting in the kitchen at the back of the house, its windows and sliding double doors open to the tall pines in the backyard. Birds chattered, announcing sunset, and the last rays of daylight fell across the table, highlighting the bottle of blackberry wine between them. Many things had nearly died out in the decades before the corporations began to clean up the environment, but the blackberries were still plentiful and the wine was good. She took a sip, rolling it on her tongue.

  "It's not as bad here in the burbs as I expected." Her male voice still surprised her. It had been a long time since she had masqueraded as a man.

  Sebastian shrugged. "Not all burbs are the same. We have good bosses here."

  "Like Gabe," Kenna said, nodding.

  "Like Gabe." Sebastian was quiet a moment, staring down at his ceramic goblet. It was hand-thrown, the glaze resembling a blue strain of mother-of-pearl. In the burbs, handcrafts were more common than mass-produced goods.

  "So what exactly happened to you?" Sebastian asked. "What's with the spooked look in your eyes?"

  Shit. She'd brought her own emotional baggage to the morph she now wore — and it showed. But she could hardly expect to slip into someone else's skin with the same dexterity she'd had a year ago. She'd have to be more careful.

  "I don't know if I can talk about it," Kenna said.

  She gazed into the purple depths of the wine, dark against the blue of the goblet. She could still see it, the rain-wet pavement as they ran, dark and slick, suddenly aware that Max wasn't with her anymore, running and looking back, seeing the way he was stumbling, moments in a series of still frames. She had increased her morph's physical strength faster than normally possible, had gone back and scooped him up and carried him, still running, from the Hypersystems plant. He showed all the signs of an identity scramble, but it had developed too rapidly to be normal, without any initial confusion, and he hadn't been morphing long enough to have reached his limit on shadow memory.

  Softec learned later about the weapon.

  Sebastian was watching her. "Must have been serious."

  "It was. I lost someone. An agent."

  "Ouch." He leaned back, a mixture of sympathy and calculation in his soft brown eyes. "You know, there's an organization trying to break the power of the corporations."

  Kenna's hand tightened on the stem of her goblet as she did her best to conceal her
triumph. "Bro, those corps will never be broken."

  "Why not?" Sebastian proceeded to tell her in glowing terms about the tech rebels smuggling technological innovations into the burbs — he called it "freeing" technology. She didn't have to fake her eagerness. She had to find the morph soon or she would start getting close to her limit. An identity scramble wasn't necessarily fatal, but out here in the burbs there was no telling when help might get to her.

  Sebastian arranged a meeting for her with a rebel leader at a nearby bar, a ten minute walk away on the edge of a former supermarket shopping area. Burb entrepreneurs had reclaimed a number of the smaller buildings, but not the biggest one, and there was talk of razing it since it had become such an eyesore. Kenna smiled to herself. Just about everything around here was an eyesore to her way of thinking.

  She picked her way through the rubble of the street, one hand on the weapon at her hip. The rain had let up, leaving humid heat in its wake — rain which had saved the Puget Sound area from the kind of forest blight other regions had suffered.

  A block away from the bar, three youths materialized from the shadow of a building in front of her, their own weapons already drawn.

  "Take your hand off the roaster."

  Kenna didn't move. "That would be pretty stupid of me, wouldn't it?"

  "All we want is your thumb," the shortest one said, probably a woman from the sound of the voice. "We can take that from you easier dead than alive."

  "It wouldn't do you any good."

  "We'll be the judges of that." One of the other two flicked open an old-fashioned knife and advanced on her.

  "One more step and I'll take one of you with me." She could well survive the encounter, but her cover would be shot.

  The first one laughed. "What makes you think you're so blistering?"