Of course, it was another ad for the mobile I’d just stuffed in my pack. A young guy rocked out to his Chipster in the shower sans earbuds. The Nomura Chipster. It speaks to you. Tacked onto the end of the ad was an announcement for a new app. It’ll be like having TFC right in your pocket. Take it back to school. Only on Nomura.
The family biz. I wasn’t looking forward to it.
The only way Dad would let me come home was if I interned at the company this summer. I’d played the prodigal son bit. I’d convinced him that my hacker ways were behind me, and all I wanted to do was learn the family biz and become the buttoned-down corporate prince he’d always wanted. I was amazed Dad bought it; he’s usually way sharper than that.
I hadn’t left him many options, I guess. Not after I got myself kicked out of Bern American last week. (And Switzerland wasn’t proving to be the neutral safe haven it had always been.)
The pilot announced our final descent. Landings were worse than take-offs. At least during take-offs I could study the flight attendant dynamics—who was senior, who got along with whom, who flirted with the passengers, who had a mother complex, who was schmoozable, who I could charm into a free headset or a drink. It’s all code. People. Systems. Software. During landings, though, the attendants are all business. They’re ready to get the hell off the plane. They’ve got husbands or hot dates or even just hot baths on their minds.
So that left me with too many idle processing cycles to crunch over the one piece of code I couldn’t crack: me. Can source code do more than it’s programmed to do? Can it peer down through its own layers to the assembly language and machine code underneath it? Can it change its very being? Whoa. Way too deep for business class.
I didn’t want to think about Winter yet, either.
I pulled up the in-flight programming on the console in front of me. Most of it was fluff, so I flicked on the news. There was a Coalition bombing in Atlanta. A Hamilton security firm that was indicted for “unlawful counterterrorist activities” was cleared of all charges. (The firm was, in turn, suing the newscast that accused it of misconduct.) TFC announced a new housing program for the homeless. And TFC was also continuing to give away new ID chips to help less fortunate Hamiltonians comply with the new security requirements.
The forgetting people are just overflowing with altruosity all of a sudden, aren’t they?
But the big story was some sex scandal with a congressman and a ’casts star I’d never heard of. Not that I’d heard of many. There goes his reelection and his shot at being president, the news reader said.
The pilot announced our final approach into Dulles. I flicked off the screen and peered out the window. The plane banked just south of Washington. I could see the white glints of the monuments, the green ribbon of the Potomac, and the flat, ugly Pentagon squatting below it like a mushroom. Beyond all that, the plane flew over houses lined up on grids and circled with fences, fanning out as far as the eye could see.
Nomura had originally wanted to build its North American headquarters in the DC ’burbs. But my great-grandfather found a more tax-(and incentive-) friendly atmosphere in Hamilton, a satellite city not too far outside the beltway, a city that would be indebted to the Nomuras in a way that the sprawling metropolis of Washington, DC, never could be.
A half-dozen banks, TFC, and several other corporate players had the same idea. Now they all act like they own the city. They do, really. I mean, if you act like you’re in charge and people go along with it, then you’re in charge. It’s all about the buy-in, the trust.
And we’re a trusting people here in the US.
Con artists like that in a mark.
6.0
IN THE GARDEN OF THE GUINEA PIGS
WINTER
We were in a cab. The news flickered across the screen between us and the driver. The Action 5 News guy said it was a record: no Coalition bombings in Hamilton since May. The mayor attributed it to the new ID program. Don’t forget, news guy added, there’s only two weeks left to get your new chip. Mayor Mignon said there’ll be zero tolerance for noncompliance. Then there was some Nomura ad, of course.
I scratched a bump behind my ear.
Wait. May? I pulled out my mobile. It was a slim, red model that I didn’t recognize. I checked the date.
June 15. Where the hell had I been?
The cabbie let us off at the corner of Eighth and Day. My brain felt like pudding. The last thing I remembered, I told Grandfather, was working on the sculpture garden in the backyard.
Sculpture garden? he’d asked as if he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
We pressed our way through the secret door in the back fence, through the Sasuke course, and through the bamboo gates into my garden.
Grandfather didn’t say a word as he took in the Pawing Man, the Flailing Arm Windmill, and the Shopping Bag Crab. Those sculptures, I remembered creating. That masked thing with the monkey wrench and the gears, though, was a complete mystery to me. It was like a stranger had invaded my garden and finished it for me.
I wanted to be that person.
How do I put that last sculpture into words? It was as if a mask had been torn away from a face, revealing the clockworks underneath. The disturbing thing was that those gears were connected to something outside of it, like the person’s brain was part of a bigger machine. It captured a feeling I knew I must have felt at one time, but it was like a memory of a memory. Like I’d seen it in a big, coffee-table book somewhere. It made me feel frenetic and serene all at once. Maybe it made me feel uncomfortable, too.
I’d started this garden to keep busy while my parents were away. Where had they gone? Something in my head whispered, Japan. That didn’t sound right. The voice didn’t sound like mine, either. Where have I been that I’ve missed creating these sculptures? Hospital, the voice whispered again.
I shook off the whisper. I didn’t remember being in the hospital. I remembered working on the Flailing Arm Windmill, waiting for Micah to come over. Or was I waiting for Grandfather to get home?
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the first time I set foot in this garden.
I could hear steps—no, running—shoes slapping in time, running in place, over this whirring sound in my head. Grandfather led me by the hand through the bamboo gate into this smooth oval of sand crisscrossed with gleaming bamboo walkways. The sand was bare, and the sun was bright overhead. He told me to be quiet, and he’d be back for me. I was scared, but I don’t remember why. I just remember the feeling—like something had been ripped away from me, or I from it. It was as if I had a big, gaping hole in the middle of me, and I just wanted to curl up and wrap myself around it, like a cocoon in the warm sun. I fought the urge for a while, listening for Grandfather or someone else to come, too scared to move. Eventually, I gave in to the feeling and fell asleep, my back pressed against the spot where the smooth walkways intersected. I dreamed of crazy, wonderful moving things growing in this garden.
Later, Grandfather gently prodded me awake.
“They’ve taken your mother and father, but you’ll be safe with me, Win-chan,” he said. “We’ll get them back.”
Taken.
I searched my brain for a memory of that word taken, of what had happened before I’d stepped into this garden, but it was like probing for a missing tooth with my tongue. It darted in and out of the empty space, finding only a hole where something solid should be.
The step-whir sound came flooding back to me then, drowning out the whispers that said Japan and assignment. The sound sped up like the wings of a hummingbird inside my head. It was an oddly comforting sound.
The hummingbird said it was all a lie. The voices lie.
My sculptures agreed.
I searched the gazebo and found the remote on the table behind the mask thing. I pressed the power button, and the Pawing Man slapped angrily at the water until it lapped up against the Shopping Bag Crab. The Crab crawled forward haltingly, weighed down by the bag it had made its hom
e, only to falter at the top of the sand mound and slide back to where it started, defeated. The limbs of the Flailing Arm sculpture turned around their windmill, reaching for something at the apex, only to be dragged back down and around for another fruitless try. The cloth from the—uh, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d called this one, but it looked like sails—the Sail Thing quivered in the breeze but didn’t do much else. I remembered thinking about them, about making them into some sort of solar chime.
I pressed another button on the remote. An eerie cacophony of low-fidelity sounds came from the canvas of the Sail Thing. Ringtones and other annoying electronic sounds mixed together to make my skin tingle. It wasn’t a soothing sound, but it captured a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Hummingbirds fluttered through my brain.
I needed to tinker with something.
My workshop off the garden was an old garage from back in the day before Grandfather’s car blew up. He’d never replaced the car. Bits and pieces of plastic, wood, and metal cluttered my workbench inside. Rusted pipes and a few sticks of lumber lay on the floor, pushed off to the side of the room. Richie’s backup guitar and amp rested on a side table. I guess I hadn’t gotten around to modifying them before I went to the hospital. (The hummingbirds fluttered at that word.) I know I had a bunch of old cell phones, but they seemed to have evaporated from the shelves. The ancient computer that anchored my garden network still hummed under my workbench. The Scooby Doo lunch box I’d gotten at a swap meet was still there as well.
That’s what I’d been thinking of doing with the sail-cloth material from Grandfather’s Sasuke course. I was going to sew the receivers into the cloth along with some solar-power cells—none of which were on the shelves, either—and make a kind of solar-powered chime. Okay, obviously I did that part already. But I’d also planned to build a low-power transmitter to control what played on the chimes.
That’s why I bought the lunch box—to house the transmitter. I picked the box off the shelf. Technically, it was an antique, though Grandfather wouldn’t like to hear that. (He’d liked the show as a kid, and it was ancient even way back then.) Something about the box had spoken to me. The turquoise and yellow tin was shaped like an old van, with the Scooby gang stuffed into the front seat and The Mystery Machine painted in reddish orange on the side. I don’t know why this silly box made me smile, but it did. I pried off the lid with a little work, and I smiled even bigger.
I had built the transmitter.
Inside, an old music pod was hooked up to the transmitter. I flicked on everything and selected a song to play. “It All Falls Away” by U-238. The music shimmered out of the sails in the garden in a satisfyingly eerie way.
To my surprise, something vibrated in my pocket. I pulled out the red mobile and slid it open. The music from my sculpture exploded in my skull; it was as if I had a tiny speaker behind my right ear. I fumbled for the mobile and slid it closed. The music stopped ringing in my brain. I turned the mobile over in my hands. The words Nomura Chipster were scrawled across its outer shell. There was also some Kanji on the back, which probably meant it was a new model still being tested. We used to get these beta and pre-beta models all the time when Mom and Dad were home. A Nomura family perk. We were the guinea pigs for every new product.
I felt behind my ear where the sound seemed to have come from. Damn. While I was out, someone implanted a chip obviously designed to work with this stupid mobile.
Did Grandfather okay this? That was so not him.
I flipped off the transmitter and closed the Mystery Machine up tight. Why would my mobile pick up the sculpture’s low-power transmission?
The hummingbirds grew louder in my head.
7.0
I PUT MY GAME FACE ON
AIDEN
As soon as we pulled up to the gate, I fished my mobile out of my pack. I had a message from Dad’s secretary.
The limo will pick you up outside baggage claim. Your father will meet you at your cousin’s house. She’s coming home today.
No kidding.
I grabbed my bags and headed toward Customs. After an interminable wait on line, and sweating through what felt like a full-cavity search of bags and person, I found the limo waiting outside.
The driver asked if I wanted to stop for coffee or something to eat before we got on the interstate. I shook my head. An ad flickered across the privacy screen between us. The mayor of Hamilton, Albert Mignon, was running for Congress.
Utterly straight-faced, he told a young mother and child, “I’ll never forget who I work for.”
This ad paid for by the Patriot Party, a wholly owned subsidiary of TFC, the fine print said underneath the scene.
Yeah, I bet he never forgets, I thought.
I pulled Winter’s book out of my backpack and flipped it open to the center. Security hadn’t even looked twice at the old library book on kinetic sculptures of the last century. But inside, concealed in a hollowed-out section, was some truly modern art: a comic called Memento.
Something had told me not to take the comics out on the plane—or to let my roomy, Chase, see them. As soon as I discovered the stash, I’d grabbed the book and headed to the bathroom down the hall.
The ink on the simple black-and-white pages still smelled fresh.
In one comic strip, a girl goes to TFC. In the waiting room, she sees a boy spitting out his pill. Then she hears her mom’s awful secret and decides to spit out her own pill in order to remember. In the second comic, a kid on a skateboard gets hit by a black van. In another, the same skateboarder sees people from a black van set what looks like a bomb on a car; the car has another kid in it. The van leaves and goes to a place marked Soft Target. The skateboarder saves the other kid before the car blows up.
It all made a good story.
Soft Target, I found out, was a real company, a Hamilton security corp that had gone bankrupt recently but had reformed under a new name: Green Zone. But that didn’t mean anything. It was just a story.
I almost filed the comics away in the maybe-Winter-is-crazy file when I ran across something else. It didn’t take me too long to find, but only because I used an open-source search before I left Bern. You can’t do those searches in the States anymore; you can search only corporate-scrubbed data. I found a newscast of a girl, Nora James, who claimed to be one of Memento’s authors, being carted off by security. The reporter, Rebecca Starr, was later axed by the ’cast. (She had a very hot tiger tattoo reaching over her shoulder.) They probably both got brain-bleached.
This was heavy stuff, if it were true. But I still didn’t get why Winter would send it to me—right before going into the hospital. She wouldn’t be part of anything like this. She wasn’t Miss Get-Involved. She’d have to like people for that.
Still, I left a few Mementos in the bathroom stalls at school before my timely departure. It seemed like the thing to do, and the universe agreed. I also posted the video to everyone’s mobile at Bern American using the school’s emergency distribution system—you know, the one they use to alert everyone about blizzards and avian flu outbreaks. Call it a parting gift.
Outside the window, the suburbs gave way to stretches of green, broken up by the occasional big-box store and gated compound. More damn ads streamed across the screen in front of me. Nomura. TFC. AmSwiss Air. Mayor Mignon. Green Zone. Starbucks. Insert random corporati. It all blurred together.
Finally, we rolled into Hamilton. The limo driver locked the doors as soon as we exited the interstate and headed into a seedier looking part of downtown. A bombed-out car sat rusting on the curb not two blocks from where we stopped. I could see why Mom wanted me to stay in Switzerland and try the school in Montreaux. She had the pull to get me in wherever. But I’d wanted to come home. Now I found myself homesick for Bern, with its cathedral, the medieval clock tower with the moving puppets, the museums, and the Garden of Roses, all in the shadows of the snowy peaked Alps. Suddenly Bern didn’t seem so cheesy.
“Is this
it?”
Winter’s home was an old warehouse, at least on the outside. Uncle Brian and Aunt Spring both worked in Research and Development at Nomura. And they were Nomuras, after all. I guess I was expecting a high-rise building with an uzi-toting doorman and valet parking.
Then I remembered. Winter had been living with her grandfather. Koji Yamada owns several tattoo parlors in Hamilton. I bet this was his idea of a bohemian, artsy kind of place, and it was probably near one of his shops.
“Your father said for you to wait in the car until he gets here.” The driver glanced nervously up and down the street. He kept the motor running and the doors locked.
A few minutes later, another limo pulled up beside ours. The doors unlocked. “I’ll take your bags home, Master Aiden,” the driver said.
Jao, who was driving Dad’s Bradley, opened the doors of both limos and watched the street as I slid from one vehicle to the other. Dad had rotated Jao home shortly after the day of the bombings; two of Mom’s goons stuck to me like snow on an Alp right up to when she put me on the plane.
“You had an uneventful flight. I didn’t hear of any computers crashing while you were over the Atlantic.” Ichiro Nomura allowed himself an upturned corner of a smile. My father is not humorless; he just seldom lets that side of him slip out from under his composed salary-man mask—unless it serves his purpose. Now his purpose was to chastise his wayward son and to remind him who was boss on this side of the Atlantic.
“Jet lag,” I said with the same half-smile on my face. “After a little sleep and some non-airplane food, I’ll be rattling those doors again.”
The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora) Page 3