The End of Ordinary

by Edward Ashton

  “Hi,” I said. “We’ve got an eight o’clock?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know. Right this way, Mr. Barnes.”

  Primo’s is an intimate place. It only seats forty or so people, and usually every table is full. That night, though, we were the only ones in the room.

  “Wow,” I said. “Slow night, huh?”

  The hostess pulled Marta’s chair out for her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Funny thing. Your server will be with you shortly.”

  Yes, it took me that long to realize what was going on. I sat. Marta was already studying the menu.

  “Your dad made them clear the restaurant, huh?”

  She gave me a long, blank stare, then returned her eyes to the menu.

  “Uh-huh. I mean, I’m sure he compensated them for lost revenue, but no—this was definitely not voluntary on Primo’s part.”

  “And all the other people who had reservations here tonight?”

  She looked up again, one eyebrow raised.

  “Probably got told they have a rat problem in the kitchen or something. Does it matter?”

  And that is when I realized that Marta and I were not, in fact, in the same social strata. Apparently, there’s a really big difference between a prince and a king.

  The server came to take our orders. She was short, and blonde, and irritated. I made a mental note to leave a really big tip. Primo may have gotten paid to shut the place down, but I was willing to bet he wasn’t sharing with the help. Marta ordered scallops. I got a wedge salad and an eight-ounce fillet. I thought about asking for a bottle of wine. The server would have brought it, of course, and not asked for proof of age—but I was already feeling mildly ill over the amount of privilege we were displaying, and I really didn’t want to push it.

  “So,” Marta said when we were alone again. “This is how the other half lives, huh?”

  I looked around.

  “What?”

  “This,” she said, and waved one arm around. “Restaurants and waitresses and whatnot.”

  I stared at her for a beat, waiting to see if she was joking.

  “No,” I said finally. “This is not how the other half lives, unless you consider the two halves to be your family and everyone else on Earth. This is a pretty exclusive restaurant, actually, and ordinarily you have to share it.”

  Her face tried to twist into a scowl, but her features couldn’t quite carry it off. I’d been trying to figure out what Marta’s mods were. I thought at first that she had a standard Pretty package with dyed-black hair, but I could see by then that wasn’t right. Her skin was too pale, and she was much too thin.

  “I told you I don’t get out much,” she said. “You don’t need to be snotty about it.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “That was rude. I’m sorry.”

  She leaned back, and folded her arms across her chest.

  “That’s better. So, you’re UnAltered, huh?”

  I could feel my jaw sag open.

  “What?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I don’t mean Last Stand in Frostburg UnAltered. I just mean . . . you know . . . not altered.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay. Yeah. I don’t have any mods. Point of advice, though—you should probably be careful about throwing the term UnAltered around when you’re slumming it with the other half. It’s kind of like calling someone a Nazi or a Klansman. People tend to get a bit touchy.”

  She sighed.

  “Duly noted. Anyway, I’ve got a custom package. They originally developed it for commercial release, but when Dad gave it to me, Mom made him pull it off the shelf. It was supposed to be called the Spooky. You like?”

  “Um,” I said. “Sure?” She raised that eyebrow again, but with a half smile this time. I could feel my face redden. “Sorry. What I meant to say is yes, definitely. It’s a good look for you, Marta. You wear it well.”

  “So,” I said. “This was fun.”

  We were back at the Park-n-Ride. Marta’s car was waiting for her, three spaces over.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was. Can we do it again?”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Marta’s face fell, and she looked away.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, thanks anyway.”

  She started to open the door. I sighed, and put my hand on her arm.

  “No,” I said. “Wait. It was fun, Marta. I mean, you understand, I’m not . . .”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m not looking to have sex with you, Jordan. I just need an excuse to get out of the house.”

  “Right. Okay then. Any time you need a break, give me a call. Just . . . can you tell your dad to lighten up a little? We torqued off a lot of folks tonight. I’d rather not start doing that on the regular.”

  She sighed. Sighing, as it turned out, was a big part of Marta’s conversational repertoire.

  “Yeah, I get that. I’ll try. No guarantees, though. He’s kind of protective.”

  I laughed.

  “I can see that. I don’t get it, but I can definitely see it.”

  Marta looked down at her feet, then back up at me. She wasn’t smiling.

  “I’ll tell you what, Jordan. After I’m gone, do a search on Dani Longstreth.”

  She leaned across the seat then, grabbed me by the back of the neck, and kissed me.

  “Nothing personal,” she said as she climbed out of the car. “That was for the drone.”

  I waited until I got home to run the search. There were a ton of hits, but I read only one of them. It was a short DirecNews feed, from six years before. I recognized the date right away. It was the second day of the Stupid War. Dani Longstreth, who was one of the earliest recipients of the original Bioteka Pretty package, was caught in an UnAltered pogrom that swept through downtown Bethesda in the middle of the day. They doused her and the other victims, who were mostly just really good-looking Homo saps, with gasoline, and they set them on fire, because the UnAltered propagandists had been pushing the line that this was the only way to prevent the spread of Altered genes. Apparently, they hadn’t figured out the differences between the reproductive methods of humans and corn. Ms. Longstreth was survived by her husband, Bioteka CEO Robert Longstreth, and their ten-year-old daughter, Marta.

  9. In which Drew receives a dire warning.

  I knew I was in trouble the first time Bree Carson showed up at my house uninvited. This was on a Monday morning in the middle of September. Kara had been gone for a week. Her mom was going through a long fade, and Kara had been staying with her dad, riding with him back and forth to the hospital, trying to keep him from fading away as well.

  That weekend had been a gray, muddy slog, but when I woke up on Monday there wasn’t any rain pounding against the windows for once, and I actually started the day thinking things might be looking up. As I was dropping Hannah off at school, the sun poked out through the clouds for the first time in days. I only had a couple of DragonCorn conferences scheduled for the afternoon, and I was thinking maybe I’d get in a long run before lunch, do a bit of tweaking to the mod package I’d been working on for the last month and a half, and then maybe catch up on my downloads during the calls.

  I was only a couple of minutes from being safely out the door in my running gear when my bedroom wallscreen popped up a still frame of Bree standing on my front porch. Her glasses were pushed up to the top of her head, and those eyes . . . I sighed, and ran my hands back through my hair.

  “Open the door,” I said, and started down the stairs.

  Bree was waiting for me, still standing on the porch outside the open front door. She smiled when she saw me.

  “Good morning,” I said. With the glasses up, I had a hard time figuring out where to look. It was hard enough to avoid staring at her breasts without worrying about locking in on those purple cat-eyes.

  “Hello, Drew,” she said. “I hope this isn’t a bad time?”

  “No,” I said, “It’s fine. What can I do for you?”

&n
bsp; “Well,” she said, “for starters, you could invite me in.”

  I stepped down into the foyer.

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re not a vampire, are you?”

  Her eyebrows came together over the bridge of her nose.

  “What?”

  “A vampire,” I said. “Isn’t that a thing? If you don’t invite them in, they can’t . . . I dunno . . . bite you, or something?”

  She shook her head. Her smile was beginning to look a little forced.

  “No, Drew. I am not a vampire. Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Tea? A beer?”

  She crossed the threshold. The door swung closed behind her.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Tea would be lovely.”

  The thing you have to understand about Bree Carson is that she wasn’t bad—which is not to say that she was necessarily good either, of course. She just wanted what she wanted, which is probably a fair description for most of us. Kara summed her up pretty well later on, after everything had settled out.

  “Imagine you’ve got a dog,” she said. “Not a yappy little dog. A big one, like a great Dane or something. Imagine you’ve got a big, slobbery, Marmaduke-looking great Dane.”

  I nodded.

  “Now imagine it’s Thanksgiving,” she said. “It’s Thanksgiving, and you just pulled a big, juicy, golden-brown turkey out of the oven. You put it on the dining-room table, and go out for a walk while it’s resting.”

  “Why would I do that?” I asked. “Shouldn’t I be making the gravy or something?”

  “Look,” she said. “Just go with me on this, okay?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Fine. I go for a walk.”

  “Right,” she said. “You go for a walk, and while you’re out, what do you suppose that big, stupid piece-of-shit dog gets up to?”

  I leaned back in my chair and sighed.

  “Does he eat the turkey?”

  “Yeah, Drew. He eats the hell out of that turkey. Now, here’s the question. Whose fault is this? Is it the dog’s fault that he ate that delicious, crispy-skinned, sweet-and-savory turkey?”

  I sighed again.

  “I’m guessing not.”

  “No,” she said, and smiled a not-at-all-happy smile. “It is not the dog’s fault. Eating turkeys is what dogs do. It’s your fault, Drew. It’s your fault for leaving the dog alone with the turkey in the first place.”

  “I’m assuming Bree’s the dog in this scenario?”

  “Right,” Kara said. “Bree is definitely the dog.”

  I will say, I never saw Bree as a dog. That Monday morning, she sat across my kitchen table from me, staring me down with those can’t-look-away eyes, drinking my oolong, and warning me about all the unsavory things that Hannah was getting into.

  “Hannah’s not a bad girl,” she said. “I would never suggest that. I’m just . . . concerned, Drew. Briarwood by itself can be a difficult place for a new girl to navigate, and when you start bringing in outside influences, well . . . Hannah has so much talent, and I’d hate to see her fall in with the sorts of kids who might pull her down instead of building her up.”

  “Well,” I said. “I won’t argue with that. The thing is, I’m not aware that Hannah’s falling in with anybody in particular just now. Other than the girls on the team, she doesn’t seem to be doing too much socializing of any kind. We’ve actually been a little worried that she’s turning into a recluse.”

  Bree smiled.

  “Don’t be naive, Drew. Just because she’s locked in her room doesn’t mean she’s alone.”

  Which was true enough, I guess, but I didn’t think there was much she could do up there to get herself into actual trouble.

  That, of course, turned out to be incorrect.

  “Look,” I said after a long, awkward pause. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m really not sure why you’re here, Bree.”

  “Oh, Drew,” she said, and reached across the table to touch my hand. “I’m here because I want to help you. You were so sweet after that mess at the Fairport meet, and I thought I could return the favor. I’m sorry if I’m intruding. I truly didn’t mean to. I just . . . I know how hard it can be for a young woman at this age. I wanted to help.”

  I suddenly felt like a colossal ass.

  “No,” I said. “You’re not intruding, Bree. I appreciate that you’re trying to look out for Hannah. I just don’t see what makes you think that she needs looking out for.”

  She leaned back, and folded her arms across her chest.

  “What do you know about Devon Morgan?”

  By the time Bree was done, I knew much more about Devon Morgan than I wanted to. I knew that Devon had anger issues, that she was jealous and resentful of Briarwood’s runners in general, and of Tara in particular, and that she was at Fairport because three different private schools, including Briarwood, had refused to admit her.

  I also learned that the reason those schools had refused to admit her was that her father was an AI sympathizer.

  Bree obviously expected that little nugget to horrify me, and I did my best to play the part. We were only six years past the war, remember, and those months between Hagerstown and Frostburg were still pretty vivid in people’s brains. The histories say the decision to purge the networks was a more-in-sorrow-than-anger thing, but that’s bullshit. I was there. It was pure panic, a reaction to the sudden realization that we’d made ourselves incredibly vulnerable—I mean, if you had an ocular, you’d opened up a direct line into your cerebral cortex that an unethical AI could exploit, and who knew whether there was any such thing as an ethical AI?—and the people who’d made the call really, really didn’t want it second-guessed. NatSec put out a ton of propaganda on the topic after the war, and six years later there were still plenty of folks running around who’d denounce you for saying anything remotely nice about life in silico.

  I wasn’t one of them, though. I wouldn’t have said it out loud then, but I remembered that essay that Mike Morgan had written, and I remembered thinking, even at the time, that he was kind of a hero.

  Once Bree was gone, I locked up the house and went out for my run. The day was as close to perfect as September gets in Upstate New York. The clouds were gone and the sun was clear and high and bright, flaring from car windshields and glittering off the puddles in the fields. The air was cool and dry, and it took me almost a mile to break a decent sweat.

  I get in most of my best thinking while I’m running. I was in the middle of a ten-miler when I came up with the idea for splicing genes that code for animal proteins into potatoes, for example. I was also out running when I figured out how to subdue a rampaging carnivorous potato horde.

  Just kidding about that last part.

  Mostly.

  That Monday, though, I wasn’t thinking about work. I was thinking about Bree. I tried to focus on the stuff she’d been telling me about Devon, and on the terrible peril that my darling daughter was apparently in from some combination of mean girls and NatSec agents, but mostly I was thinking about the feel of Bree’s lips on my cheek, and what those purple cat-eyes looked like from two inches away.

  The weird thing was, I wasn’t even really attracted to Bree. I was just . . . maybe fascinated is the right word? As an engineer, I was impressed as hell with what they’d managed to do with her. You tweak as many genes as they must have to get what they got in Bree, and more often than not you wind up with a carnivorous potato.

  As a man, at that point, I was mostly confused.

  When I was younger, I’d never had much luck with pursuing women, and by the time I was into college, I’d basically given up. I had pretty much resigned myself to a life of work, quiet contemplation, and lots and lots of masturbating . . . until I met Kara.

  This was on a Thursday night in April of my junior year at Hopkins, at a bar called the Lizard Lounge in downtown Baltimore. The place was built like an indoor amphitheater, with concentric half rings of table
s descending in steps toward a stage where two pianos sat in front of the main bar. They usually kept both of them manned, sometimes by comedians, sometimes by serious musicians. There were bags of peanuts on every table, and the floor was covered a half inch deep in crushed shells.

  They had a sort of a comedy act playing that night, a man and a woman at the two pianos banging out up-tempo political satire that mostly went straight over my head. I was there with Matt Porter, another aspiring engineer who was even more socially hapless than I was. We were sitting at a high table about halfway between the doors and the bar, nursing our first beers, filling up on peanuts and arguing about whether dogs actually like their owners or not, when Kara climbed onto the stool next to mine.

  “Hey,” she said. “These guys are pretty good, right?”

  Kara was tall and broad-shouldered—a swimmer, I’d find out later—with long dark hair, pale, freckled skin, and eyes like a hawk. She was smiling in a way that I couldn’t quite place.

  “Sure,” I said. “I guess so. I mean, I mostly don’t have any idea who or what they’re singing about, but they seem to know how to play the piano, anyway.”

  She laughed.

  “Not a poli-sci major, huh?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nope. Gene Eng.”

  She gave me a smirk—the same one I always got when I told people what I was studying.

  “In it for the cash, huh?”

  I shrugged.

  “Cash is good, right? But no, not really. I just like trying to figure out how to make things work, and this seemed like my best shot at getting to do that for a living.”

  I finished my beer. Kara smiled and said, “You want another one?”

  I gave her a hesitant smile in return.

  “Sure. I mean, I guess so.”

  As she was making her way up to the bar, Matt leaned over and asked me who she was.

  “No idea,” I said. “She just sat down and started talking to me.”

  “Huh.”

  He gave me a look that was a weird mixture of resentment and respect, and took a swig from his mostly empty beer. The piano players started in on a new song, about a Supreme Court decision that had just come down declaring that gene mods were covered under the same blanket privacy rights that protected abortion. They were finally singing about something that I was at least vaguely interested in, and I was really trying to catch what they were saying when Kara came back.