by Mark Budz
L. Mariachi shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”
“You never did,” Lejandra whispers. Her voice catches a corner of his mind and reels him in.
He meets her incandescent gaze, the yellow haloes around her white-hot eyes. “I guess not.”
“I came here to find you.” The words rattle in her throat.
“Why?” he says.
“So she could meet you!” the parrot screeches.
For an instant, it occurs to him that she might be a fan, an autograph seeker. One of those people who hunts down celebrities.
“You still don’t know who I am,” Lejandra says, “do you?”
“No.” A lie. He’s known all along. From the moment he first saw her looking at him in the darkness . . .
“This is crazy,” he said to Renata, barely visible beside him. “Why’d you take it?”
“I had to.” The guitar banged against her hip. Her lip trembled, stained yellow by a passing streetlight.
“Why?”
Sol was sick, had been for a week. Some illness he picked up at the vat pharm. The ailment was a mystery. Evidently the politicorp clinic couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Claimed, off the record, that he’d been exposed to illegal pherions and refused treatment even though five other vat rats, all labor union organizers, had come down with the same debilitating malady.
Renata was frantic. They couldn’t afford a private doctor. The burning sensation in his limbs kept getting worse, as if his nerves were bare electric wires.
It wasn’t anything he hadn’t asked for. Joining a labor group. What did the moron think? That the politicorp would sit back and do nothing?
But that wasn’t how Renata saw it. She saw his affliction as noble. She was like a moth captivated by light, unable to see anything, or anyone, except Sol.
“How is this going to help?” L. Mariachi said.
“It will pay for a ribomancer.” A black-market physician. Very discreet . . . very expensive. Used primarily by upper-clade caucs and slumhounds who wanted to keep their indiscretions private.
“You’re going to sell it?”
“I have to do something!” Her jaw clamped firm, unwavering. Nothing was going to deter her.
It didn’t stop him from trying. Maybe she would listen to reason. Maybe she would realize that there was no hope, and let go of Sol. That Sol had forsaken her. “This isn’t the way to help him,” L. Mariachi said.
She spun, hair lashing his cheek in a whip crack of anger. “What do you suggest? That I sit back and do nothing?”
He stared at her, unable to speak. Silenced by her pomegranate lips, heart-shaped cheeks, and almond eyes, ire-blackened and bruised with desperation. The Killer Guitar dangled from her hands.
She tossed her hair. “Are you going to help me or not?”
He was a moth, too. Dazzled . . . drawn to his own alluring light, one he could circle but never become part of.
“You have her eyes,” he says. “Her mouth.”
“Not anymore.” She raises a gaunt hand to her lips.
“Where were you born?”
“Bogatá. That’s where she went after Sol died.”
“Why?”
“To escape Ass Assin. To make sure that he wouldn’t find her, or me. She didn’t want to be looking over her shoulder.”
“But the message she sent. About joining Sol. Killing herself . . .” His voice trails off.
“A lie,” she says. “No different than the one you told her.”
He almost chokes on a laugh. “So we believed each other.” He hadn’t been able to read between the lines either. Hadn’t been able to do what he’d asked of her.
“I’m sorry about your hand.” She reaches for his gnarled fingers, squeezes them, her grip bird-light.
“Is that why you’re here? To apologize for her?” For the pain he’s endured at her expense. For the long years of silence. For allowing him to believe she was dead.
“No.”
He shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t worth it. I’m not worth it.”
“That’s not for me to decide. She wants to see you.”
L. Mariachi’s heart skips a beat. “She’s still alive?”
“Before I gave you the message I wanted to see what you were like. What kind of person you are. How you felt about her.”
“Where is she?”
Her hand slips from his and settles across her stomach. “You know how to get in touch with her. If you want.”
Does he? He isn’t sure. What will it change?
“You’re not going to tell me.” He can see it sketched in the ashen shadows of her face.
“It’s up to you now,” she says. “Your choice.” Her eyes close. She seems to fall back into herself, the shadows pulled like drapes across her features.
“You better get going,” Num Nut says. “A med copter is on the way. The BEAN agents will be here any minute.”
It’s brighter now. The greenhouse has faded from black to gray.
He grabs the guitar and makes a beeline from the office to a row of white plastic barrels. As he passes the old containers, biohazard symbols grin at him, fanged, smiling.
“Turn left,” the parrot says.
He veers down an aisle between stacked barrels, past a mountain of plastic pallets to a warped lichenboard door set in a corroded metal frame. He grips the door handle, braces himself, and yanks on it. To his surprise the door swings open easily.
Tepid dawn air rushes in, smelling of coffee, hot-plate tortillas, and cigarette smoke. The smells sucker-punch him. He clutches his gut, doubled over by a spasm of hunger, and clenches his eyes tight.
A stucco wall topped with bougainvillea takes shape around him. He’s in a small enclosed garden, overgrown with cactus and swarming with butterflies, feathered insects, and snakes that patrol the base of the wall. To his right an arched gate leads to a footpath between marble columns.
It takes several breaths for the pain to subside to the point where he can straighten. Breathe past the knife-edge pang. Open his eyes.
“Which way?” he says.
“There’s an effluent treatment station with a waste-removal shuttle you can catch on the northern edge of the biovats.”
The equivalent of an old freight train. Enormous trash containers hauled out on a monorail to toxic dump sites in the Nebraska-Kansas badlands.
“How are we going to get there?” It must be five kilometers. It’s not like he can walk it, not in the shape he’s in. Dehydrated, sleep deprived, half-starved. It’s a miracle he’s made it this far.
The bird tilts its head in deliberation. First to one side, then the other, weighing their options. It stiffens in midthought.
L. Mariachi tenses. “What?”
The tungsten spotlight of a jet copter from Front Range City catches the doorframe next to him. The phosphor wink of light, harsh blue incandescence, teases his retinas.
“What?” he says, glancing around, half expecting to see the BEAN agent behind him, taser drawn, grinning at his gullibility.
The parrot unfreezes. Instead of its disembodied cackle, he hears a familiar voice.
“It’s time,” the Blue Lady says. “I can’t wait any longer.”
Gripping the guitar by the neck, his hands sweaty, his chest aching, he steps from the greenhouse into the garden.
32
NEURAL GHOSTS
You can save her,” Pheidoh says, “but you have to hurry.”
Fola glances up from Xophia, her gaze sliding along the chrysalis-tough membrane of the ICM life-support sac to the sheet-diamond window that looks out over the quarantine zone. In the hexcell above her, the shuttle pilot, who goes by the handle of Pontius, huddles with the surviving refugees. One cell over, Lisi is alone with Ephraim. She’s folded back his bubble helmet to wash his face, revealing a dull glint of metal around his neck.
Her missing cross. Stolen? Or was Ephraim holding it for safekeeping? Like the mystery of th
e cross itself, there’s no way to know. She’s free to believe what she wants.
“What do I have to do?” Fola says.
The IA doesn’t answer. It doesn’t have to.
She signs into the ribozone garden where she told L. Mariachi she would wait for his response. It’s too early. His transmission, if there is one, hasn’t arrived yet.
“Pheidoh?”
The datahound fails to appear. A swell of uneasiness washes over her. She attempts to sign out, can’t. The snake-guarded walls of the garden remain firmly in place.
Now what?
A figure darkens the bamboo-enclosed tunnel leading from the garden to the main ecotecture. It approaches slowly, at a lazy saunter intended to put her at ease or make her sweat. Whoever it is, his construct is big. It fills up the tunnel. Part of that is a gigantic, wide-brimmed Stetson. The hat slouches to one side as if sagging with fatigue around the edges.
The figure pauses at the inside gate. It takes a moment to peer around the garden, then pushes open the gate and walks in.
“Howdy,” Rexx says, tipping his hat and crooking a smile. “It’s good to see you again.”
Fola relaxes.
“How you feelin’?” he says. “Okay?”
His drawl spills over her like warm bath water. “Better,” she says. “Thanks.”
“No ill effects from the accident?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
His smile broadens. He nods, appears genuinely pleased by the news. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“What are you doing here?” she says.
Rexx frowns at the snakes patrolling the base of the wall. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“I can’t leave. I’m trapped.”
“That’s not what I’m talkin’ about.” His gaze continues its unhurried circuit of the garden, circling back to her. “We need to have a chat.”
She can’t tell if this is in answer to her question or an unrelated sidebar. “About what?”
He squints at her. “You have a neural ghost, a mimetic scar where a slave-pherion was illegally removed.”
She wraps her arms around herself, the way she would a robe, to keep from being seen. “You can see that? Inside me?”
He shrugs, no big deal, like he sees inside people all the time. “Your clade-profile and pherion pattern. I’m curious where the scar came from.”
It makes sense. He’s a gengineer, he works with architext all the time. He strolls over to a cactus and inspects the arrangement of flowers.
“I was deprogrammed,” she says.
He looks up from his careful scrutiny. “By choice or by force?”
“The ICLU rescued me. From the Ignatarians.”
“So a little of both, I reckon.” He rubs his chin, a craterlike depression formed by the tectonic collision of flabby skin. His hand is unsteady, trembling. “Do you miss it? Being a Jesuette, I mean?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. Sometimes. I can’t help it. I don’t want to, but . . .”
What else is there to say?
He nods, sympathetic. “I’m not surprised. Neural ghosts are like that. They hang around—remind us of who we aren’t. What we’ve lost.” His gaze loses its focus as it turns inward.
“Were you an Ignatarian?”
“No.” He offers a self-deprecating grin. “Just an ignoramus. A different kind of religious calling.”
Fola nods, the tip of her tongue pressed against the back of her teeth. “Sometimes I don’t . . .” The thought struggles to take shape. The urge to explain is like a tightly wound spring, pent up, aching to release long-coiled energy. “I still want to make a difference. To help people. But . . .”
“Not in the same way.” Rexx removes his hat, makes a show of dusting off invisible burrs and specks of dust with tottering fingers. “Is that what your IA promised? That you’d be helping people? Making the world a better place?”
“You talked to Pheidoh?”
“More or less.”
“So you know what’s going on.”
Rexx taps the hat against one thigh. “From what I gather, it’s feeling a mite under the weather. Is that the gist of it?”
“Yes. It thinks it’s infected with a quantum virus.”
Rexx makes a face. “What does it mean by that?”
“I’m not sure. It mentioned quantum entanglement. And somebody named Fröhlich. A solid-state physicist from the last millennium.”
“What else?”
“It talked about being unbalanced; what it described as behavioral inconsistency and intellectual instability.”
“Unbalanced how?”
“Psychologically. It thinks it’s mentally ill . . . and that if it doesn’t get rid of the virus it’s going to go insane.”
Rexx wipes his brow with the sleeve of his embroidered shirt, then replaces the hat. “Did Pheidoh happen to mention how it intends to get rid of this virus?”
“A musician named L. Mariachi. He did a song called ‘SoulR Byrne. . . .’”
“‘I wanna be your soul provider,’” Rexx says in an easygoing singsong, “‘your sole insider.’”
“That’s the one. According to Pheidoh, the song can produce Fröhlich-style quantum activity in certain molecules. Molecules that have supposedly been found in fossils on Mymercia and Tiresias.”
Rexx strokes a pendulous earlobe. “So playing the song will create a quantum field that will . . . do what? Kill the virus?”
“No. Neutralize it.”
“How?”
Fola purses her lips. “By incorporating it into a larger whole. Supposedly that will render it harmless.”
“But Pheidoh’s not sure.”
“No.”
Rexx lets go of the earlobe. “Has L. Mariachi agreed to the gig?”
“I’m not sure. I messaged him about it a few hours ago. But I haven’t heard back from him yet. Why?”
Rexx sighs. Rubs the back of his neck. “How come the IAs wanted you to talk to him?”
“I guess because I’d worked with refugees before, poor people, and could relate to him.”
“In other words, they felt he would trust you. A former Jesuette.”
She nods.
“Do you trust Pheidoh?” Rexx asks. “The IAs?”
“I don’t think it’s lost it, if that’s what you mean. Not yet. It’s trying to cure itself. People who ask for help, who admit that they have a problem, are usually honest. Trying to do the right thing.”
“Most of the time.” Rexx shifts his hand from the back of his neck to the dewlap under his chin. “Problem is, we’re not dealing with people. We forget they’re not human. I’ve done it myself. It’s an easy mindset to fall into.”
He doesn’t say “mistake,” but she can read it on his face. “You think that Pheidoh’s using me to manipulate L. Mariachi?”
“It’s possible. Perhaps not maliciously. But that doesn’t mean he still can’t get hurt. That other folks won’t suffer.”
Fola feels her eyes tighten at the corners. “You know something about the disaster you’re not telling me. What?”
He tugs at the pendulous flap of skin, pinching it, quelling the tremor in his fingertips. “All I’m sayin’ is that Pheidoh might not be thinking very clearly. Might not be in complete control of its faculties. My IA went loony as a toon. So it stands to reason that if it happened to one it could happen to the others. Especially if they’re one big dysfunctional family.”
“What did your IA do?”
“Nothin’ too drastic. Dudded itself up like a skeleton. Told me to get the hell out of Dodge. Then tried to bash my brains in.”
Watching his expression, she’s not sure who’s more wacked. “What can you tell me about vaporware and quantum dots? Is it safe to download them into people?”
“Depends.” Rexx relinquishes his wattle, leaving a stretch mark.
“What if the person’s been”—how did Pheidoh put it?—“reconfigu
red?” That was the word.
“Recladed?”
“Not exactly. The pherions L. Mariachi’s dosed with have been replaced with ones that are made up of . . . quantum dots that can be reprogrammed. Changed into different atoms and molecules.”
Rexx rubs at his forehead. Looks at her through the bars of his fingers. “Worst-case scenario, the nice shiny chrome on L. Mariachi’s neurons gets tarnished and pitted. Rust sets in, followed by dementia.”
“It was the only way to free him from BEAN,” a voice says behind them.
The two of them turn.
Fola bites on a knuckle, stifling a gasp. Rexx lowers his hands, revealing droopy, bloodshot eyes.
“What the hell?” he says.
The avatar is vaguely human. It has recognizable arms and legs sprouting from a distorted hourglass torso. The skeletal appendages are a hodgepodge of metal, bone, and wood spliced together like found art affixed to a fire-warped mannequin. The head is the most intact feature, the least deformed. It has stone teeth. Alien-looking flowers have replaced its ears. But the nose is normal, and so are the eyes. Clear, but deep set, almost as if they are sinking, being slowly pulled inward.
The avatar takes a tentative step toward them.
Fola starts to move back, then stands her ground. “Pheidoh?”
“I am sorry,” the datahound says. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold on to what I was.”
“What happened to you?”
“My sense of identity is deteriorating. Being degraded and dissolved, consumed by unstable selves.”
“Claire?” Rexx says. “Tin Ida?”
“And others.” The IA touches its head. “This is all that is left of me.”
“What do you want?” Rexx says. “Why are you here?”
“I thought it would be nice to listen to a little music.” The IA sounds forlorn and nostalgic. “This might be my last chance.”
Rexx hitches up his shoulders. “I thought you didn’t want to have diddly to do with us anymore. That you were turnin’ your back on everything human.”
“It didn’t start out that way. It started out as a search for an identity, a self based on the only cultural/spiritual history and modes of personal/social evolution we had access to.”