by Emma Newman
I don’t think I can get away with that now; she’s too old. Another idea comes to mind though, so I start up the cam before I talk myself out of it.
“Hello, Mia! It’s nearly bedtime so I thought I would tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a little girl called Mia and she lived in a giant tree in a magical wood. Every morning she had her breakfast brought to her by little blue birds with purple beaks. They brought her berries and flowers filled with nectar and water for her morning drink. Mia loved living with her daddy in the giant tree, because he made sure no bears or zombies— Shit. I can’t put zombies in a kid’s story. I’ll edit that out in a minute . . . Ummmm . . . because he made sure no bears could come to eat her. Mia’s mummy wasn’t at home because she had to fly to a star to make the king of the wood even more rich. Ummmm . . . I’ll change that later. But every night, Mummy waved from the star, hoping that Mia might wave back.”
I stab the recording button, hating the way my throat is clogging up. I’m no good at stories. This was a stupid idea. But more than that . . . I’m missing her.
It’s a strangely reassuring ache, as unpleasant as it is. Perhaps I’m not a monster. It’s not that I don’t love her—I do—but just not with the spear-through-the-chest sort of love that those other mothers told me I would have. I regret what I said to Petranek and the lack of explanation I gave.
I should have said that when I held Mia for the first time, I just felt relief that the birth was over. I felt like I’d been thrown down a mountain. I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. When I looked into her purply pink face, wrinkled up and blotchy and distressed by the trauma of being squeezed out into the world, I didn’t feel a rush of love. I felt fear. Shock. A quiet dread. Here was a new human being whom I was responsible for, incapable of caring for herself, fragile and terrifying to hold. The main thing I felt was the certainty that I would screw it up, not a love like no other.
Charlie was sobbing and I passed her over to him as the midwife checked me over. All of our arguments about where and how the birth was going to happen were forgotten the moment he held her in his arms. And I could see it come over him, that magic that I’d been promised by so many. How huge his eyes were, dark with love, taking in every detail of her face as if she were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. She was still covered in the mess of birth and, in all honesty, quite horrific-looking, but he was cooing at her like some lovestruck idiot.
Thank God he was. I was free to pull back, to let him do what I should have been capable of. At the birth center the emphasis was on traditional methods, so they didn’t take her off to be cleaned up right away. It was the compromise we’d come to between my desire to be at my mum’s house and his insistence on going to a hospital. As soon as I arrived in the early stages of labor I knew I should have stood my ground and just gone to Mum’s. I couldn’t stand the bland music, the pastel colors, the soft edges to everything. All the women, dressed in uniforms with little duck patterns on them, as if infantilizing mothers in labor was preferable to the cold reassurance of professional uniforms. I’d rather have given birth in the woods behind the house I grew up in, squatting over a blanket, than in that place. It was all locked in by that point though, and I knew that if I left, I’d void our insurance and Charlie would never forgive me if something went wrong. That was the argument he’d won with. What if something happens? He simply didn’t listen to my counter, that it was more likely to go wrong if I was stressed out in some unfamiliar sterile environment.
The birth center was a disguised hospital, for all intents and purposes, designed to look more like a homely place without the scary medical equipment on full show. I found it jarring, that discordant mix of controlled environment and relaxed lighting. It heightened my sense of wrongness. Being there felt like looking at mainstream feeds curating “content for women,” recognizing nothing of myself in them. Better than a hospital, yes, but not somewhere I could feel relaxed and safe. But then, I hadn’t felt relaxed and safe for nine months, so what difference did one more night make?
It’s hard to disentangle this sensation of wanting to be with Mia from the omnipresent guilt. And I know, I just know, that if somehow, magically, I could walk out of this room and into our apartment, it would quickly fade. I’d hold her, play with her a little bit, and then I’d want to be elsewhere. It’s always like that. Why would that be different now?
The thing that no one ever seems to want to admit is that small children are boring. It felt like becoming a mother meant I had to be stuffed into a smaller box in my own life. All the things that I’d strived for professionally, all of the battles hard fought and won to carve out a career in science that satisfied me as well as my gov-corp, all of that was supposed to be put away. I was a mother now, and all I was supposed to care about was my baby.
I lie down on the bed and curl up, feeling my own hateful selfishness too keenly. I shouldn’t have had a child; that’s what it comes down to. I should have stood up to Charlie. I should have—
I stretch out, flat on my back, calling up the list of personal mersives. I haven’t used today’s allocation. I didn’t yesterday either. I’ll see Mia, cut off this craving at the root and then go to the lab and start looking at those samples.
There are huge gaps in the list. Months when I was incapable of summoning the desire to even just record with full immersion. There are a handful of five-minute snippets in her first month, then only sporadic recordings, until the flurry of those made between the meeting with Stefan Gabor in which he told me about his “wonderful idea” and my leaving Earth. It’s like looking at a timeline of my attitude toward motherhood. Those early recordings of snatched moments in between sleeping and feeding and the zombified drudge of getting through each day, then the desert of those two months before Charlie stepped in fully, and then the guilt-ridden desperation of gathering as many moments as possible before leaving.
So many of these I can remember just from the date stamp, let alone the tags I’ve assigned to them, I’ve relived them so much. I spot one that’s been neglected, tagged “wrong again,” and, weirdly, I can’t recall its contents. According to the time stamp, Mia would have been just shy of four weeks old when it was recorded.
It takes moments to whip through the series of dialog boxes requesting confirmation that I’m not controlling machinery or a vehicle, that I am in a safe environment, that I’m aware of the risks—oh yes, painfully aware!—and then I’m in our apartment again.
It’s a mess and there’s the unmistakable smell of recently changed nappy: a mixture of something awful fading and the scent of the thick white cream that prevents nappy rash. Charlie is next door in the bedroom, trying to work, and I’m in the living room, shaking a giraffe-shaped rattle a few centimeters above Mia.
She is small and wriggly, her arms and legs waving around with no control. It’s months before she’ll grab the rattle, but I’m still shaking it above her, eager to stimulate her brain.
Her lips curl up and I stop moving the rattle. “Charlie! Charlie, she’s starting to smile!”
“It’s too early,” he calls back through the door.
“No, it’s not. Come and look! You’ll miss it!”
He comes out, grinning, never grumpy about his work being interrupted like I always am. Basalt follows him out and gives Mia a quick sniff around her head. Satisfied that all is well, he lopes back to the bedroom to curl up on the bed and wait for Charlie to return. Charlie kneels next to me, leaning over her. “Hello, monkey! Are you going to smile? Smile for Daddy!”
“There, did you see that?” I say and he shakes his head.
“That’s wind,” he says authoritatively.
“No, it’s not.”
He gets up after planting a soft kiss on Mia’s forehead. “I’ve got to finish this update. Keep working on that fart, tiger,” he says to Mia.
“It really isn’t a—”
The
loud raspberry noise from her nappy makes him laugh out loud. “Whoa, she’s gone red. That was a corker. You’d better check she didn’t follow through.”
I bite back the comment that I know what to do and he shuts the door. From the way the smell is lingering, there’s a chance it was more than gas.
I reach for the fasteners on her sleep suit and everything freezes.
“Sorry about this,” says a familiar voice. Someone I’ve heard before, but I can’t place him. “Just give me a moment. Everything is okay. Don’t panic, Dr. Kubrin.”
Mia disappears. So do all of the traces of her. No piles of clothes waiting to be sorted, no bags of clean nappies, no toys. The sofa disappears and so does the folded table on the far side of the room. It feels surreal, like I’m in one of those store mersives in which you can test whether the furniture you want fits in your home before you buy it. I’m too busy trying to place that voice to panic, and it’s happening so fast that before I know it, the huge temporary dining table is back, covered with the tablecloth and set for dinner like the day the Gabors came.
Travis. That’s the voice. It’s Travis Gabor.
“Hello, Dr. Kubrin.”
I turn and he’s sitting down at the table, in the place he sat for dinner. There’s even the smell of the meal recently cooked. He’s wearing the same suit, looking just as handsome as he did that day.
“Come and sit down. You’re probably feeling disoriented. I apologize and I will explain. You can’t converse with me properly, I’m afraid; this is just a rendered mersive I constructed from memories of your apartment. I’ve made an effort to predict some of your responses, and if any of those match what you say, I will be able to reply to your questions. I will make it clear if I haven’t predicted something you say.”
Dazed, I go over to the table and sit where I did at the dinner party, because that’s where his attention is focused. As soon as I sit down, it feels like he is looking at me.
“This is the equivalent of a gaming mersive,” he says with a smile. “You can’t come to any physical harm here. I’ve locked you out of making any changes though, so this is more like a loading room, I suppose. I hid this message inside one of your personal mersives, or rather, the synaptic ‘bookmark’ your chip uses to access it. It was the only way that I could speak to you without anyone else knowing.”
He seems so very different from when I met him at the dinner party. Back then, he was so . . . full-on, fizzing like soda, thrilled by everything and sparkling as much as he could. Seeing him now, listening to his voice and how calm he is, makes his previous behavior seem as if he was playing a part. Perhaps this is just the recording-a-message version of Travis, but this man seems more real to me than the one I met on Earth.
“I’m sorry if it was a bit strange when the transition was made between your mersive and the start of this message,” he continues, “but I had to design it to fit as closely as possible, and only be accessed once you were in a recording. It helps to mask what we’re doing from Principia and from your MyPhys too. I won’t bore you with the details, but I can assure you that this is highly illegal. I’m putting myself at great risk to do this, along with the other people involved in making the upgrades to your chip. If you’d had one of the later versions when you signed the Mars contract, this would have been so much harder.”
I look around, becoming aware of tiny differences. This isn’t a perfect replication of my apartment. It’s too small for one thing and the kitchen corner is inaccurate. All the paintings are faithfully reproduced, however, and I realize I’m actually able to piece together what he was interested in when he was in my apartment for real. The things he didn’t attend to have been filled in by software.
“It’s hard to give you this message without freaking you out. Believe me, I’ve given this a lot of thought. Pulling off something like this takes a huge amount of planning, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate. I recommend that you sit and stay as calm as possible. Give yourself a bit of time to process it. Don’t rush into anything once this message has finished. If you need to replay it, simply go back to the personal mersive you selected before. I only stole the last second or two of it to knit this one in.”
I’m gripping the edge of the table, seized by the feeling that my life is about to be blown apart. I know what that feels like. It’s happened before.
“You’ve been silent for several seconds now, probably because you’re shocked. Maybe a little bit scared. I’m sorry. I need you to do something for me, something very important. Anna? Are you still with me?”
“Yes,” I croak.
“I need you to understand that no one on Principia or on Earth can know about this message, or about what I need you to do. If you help me, I’ll help your father.”
“My father? What does he have to do with any of this?”
“He has everything to do with why we’re having this conversation and why you’re on Mars and nothing to do with what I need you to do for me. If you commit to helping me, I’ll explain everything.”
I can feel myself shutting down, like an overworked chip that has gotten too hot and is switching off so it doesn’t permanently damage itself. This isn’t real. It isn’t happening. I don’t need to hear this.
“Anna, I need to know you’re going to be discreet. You want your dad to get the help he needs, don’t you?”
“Stop talking about him,” I say through clenched teeth. “Just shut up.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t predicted that response. Have you noticed that something isn’t right on Principia?”
This disjointed conversation, built on Earth, played out on Mars, actually helps. If it were with the real Travis, he’d be drilling down into this reluctance to talk about the man he’s using as leverage. I’m torn between wanting to understand it all and never thinking about it again.
“Something isn’t right here. I agree with that.” And I don’t just mean in Mars Principia.
“Then let me help you work out what that is. That’s all I want. Look, I don’t trust my husband; that’s what this comes down to. I know he bought the rights to Mars for a reason, and I don’t think it’s one that will be good for anyone except himself. He’s hiding something and I want you to find it.”
“On Mars?”
Travis nods. “There are discrepancies between the officially logged flight manifests and the cargo weights that have left Earth. He’s sending more than he’s declaring. I want you to find out what that is. And I need you to get me evidence. That’s going to be difficult. You can’t trust anyone on that base, or the AI. They must be in on it.”
“But why me?”
“All of the scientific duties of his staff up there have been scaled back. They’re not even allowed to explore anymore. Mars Principia is little more than a mersive factory now, but you have good reason to get out there and look around. You’re there by the order of Stefan Gabor himself and you’ll be able to use that if Principia starts being problematic.”
“And what if I find something? How do I tell you?”
“I’ve set up a dead drop for packets of information. When the time comes, ask me and I’ll run you through it. If you blow this open, Anna, people could die. I’d be one of them and so would you. Do you understand how important it is that you not trust anyone on the base?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“In case you’re worried, you’re not going mad,” Travis says, appearing to look straight at me. “This isn’t the same as what happened to your father.”
“How the hell do you know that?” I say without thinking.
“Because I know what they did to him.”
“I can’t stay here on my own. I’ll go mad.”
I push the memory of my father’s voice away and focus on Travis. “What ‘they’ did to him? ‘They’ don’t exist.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t predicted that respons
e. I’m going to continue with the message.”
“No,” I say, and Travis pauses. I can’t take this in. All these years I’ve been convinced my mother is simply blinded by love. And now a mere acquaintance who has somehow hijacked my chip and is using it to talk to me in secret is telling me that “they” exist? That my father really is the victim my mother has always said he was? That he was telling the truth all those times I sat there in the visiting room, silent, staring, wondering if I would ever have the man back whom I had loved so dearly? “Fuck this. End mersive.”
“Anna, there’s more I need to tell you. I can help. Principia—”
“No! End mersive. End mersive!”
9
PRESSING THE HEELS of my hands into my temples doesn’t really do much to help but I find myself doing it anyway. I stay on the bed until my breathing returns to normal, worrying about what Elvan and Arnolfi will make of that spike in the MyPhys data.
After a couple of minutes, the pseudo-conversation with Travis feels like a dream. The familiar yet slightly inaccurate version of my home, the pure lunacy of its contents. Is what he described even possible? Can you really piggyback mersive recordings with a totally new one? I’m certain there was some kind of prosecution for something along those lines, before I was born. It was such a notorious case it was still referred to when I was growing up. Something about a company hacking the early chips—the ones that were dubbed the Titanic model because they had been famously branded as being impossible to hack—and putting products into people’s personally recorded mersives. The scary thing was that no one reported it for days; they simply didn’t notice that the products recorded in the background had changed from one brand to another. It was only picked up when someone with atypical neuroanatomy reported seeing designer sunglasses floating in the air in a personal mersive.