by Dave Smeds
I passed into the dining room. She’d always kept a drawing that I’d done at age six fastened to the food exchanger. She’d been amused by the artwork’s scatological humor — I’d just figured out for the first time that the food the dining table created for us was a recycled version of what we put in the toilet.
No drawing. Not believing my eyes, I rushed into the workout room. I stepped on the mat and said, “Run routine thirty-seven.”
A virtual of a svelte woman in a leotard appeared at the edge of the mat and began a regimen of exercises. I stared at her blankly. Routine thirty-seven should have been the recording of me, as a teenager, running through an entirely different set of calisthenics. Mom used to play it back quite often.
I stalked through the apartment, scanning right and left. I didn’t have to search through much. Monica didn’t like clutter; she knew she could always call up an object from its scan if she wanted it.
Nothing. Not a trace, not a single piece of evidence to show that she’d ever had a daughter.
That bitch. After all that talk she’d spouted at friends and relatives about how long she’d waited, about how exhaustively she’d searched the catalogs to find just the right sperm culture, and how she never would have gotten permission to have me if the Cassiopeia colony hadn’t opened up, prompting the policymakers to rescind the birth moratorium for her age group.
She couldn’t even wait until I was dead to erase me from her life.
I kept down the bubble that was trying to work its way up my esophagus. I relaxed my fingers, but they kept curling into fists. Mom was going to have quite a reception waiting when she got back.
Mother
“Good evening, Monica,” said my door. “You have visitors.”
I took two steps back toward the elevator. I had dreaded this moment ever since Ellen and I had confirmed that Cheryl had taken the bait. My heart pounded, threatening to bruise the inside of my rib cage.
“Shield at level ten,” I said.
Normally I maintain my personal body shield on level two — just enough to keep gnats and flies from getting in my face. I don’t like setting it so high that it stops bullets; the feedback makes me feel as if I’m moving through molasses. But I couldn’t walk in there unprotected.
I pressed my thumb to the lock and shoved the door inward.
A body dangled from my chandelier, noose tight around her neck, blue tongue protruding from her mouth. Her jeans were wet at the crotch where the bladder had voided during strangulation.
It was not Cheryl. My offspring sat in a hammock chair at the far side of the living room.
“Hi, Mom,” she said sweetly.
Cheryl rocked gently to and fro. Behind her the window broadcast a panoramic sweep of tropical island beach, dotted with coconut palms and bougainvillea. I recognized the flowers as a hybrid designed by Maestro Nathaniel Martin. I’d always hated the maestro’s bizarre color combinations. I hated hammock chairs. Cheryl knew those things.
Something was odd about her looks, something I couldn’t quite pin down. But I was too agitated to dwell on it.
I scowled at her friend in the noose. “Any others around?”
“Just Jacques.”
I raised an eyebrow. She pointed at the closet.
I opened the door. The body of a man flopped onto my carpet, so stiff that he bounced like a mannequin and so brittle that he shattered three fingers. Frost rained out of his curly hair like a massive case of dandruff.
“Yesterday I called him a cold son of a bitch,” Cheryl said. “So he decided to prove me right.”
I checked the temperature coding for the closet, and found it set at minus 200°C. I ordered it back to normal. I didn’t need a goddamn deep freeze in my home. Hadn’t since nanotech had eliminated the need to store food.
“Oh, don’t do that, Mom. He wants to stay dead the whole twenty-four hours.”
I frowned, puzzled until I recalled that if a body is essentially intact but in a continually lethal environment — hanging from a noose and standing in a deep freeze would certainly qualify — the nanodocs hold off on repair until either the circumstances change or, at the twenty-four hour mark, they abandon the body and generate a new one from the person’s latest scan. I suppose it could annoy Suicidals to go to all the trouble of killing themselves only to wake up a few minutes later.
“That’s his problem,” I retorted, and stepped over the corpsicle.
“Mom. You’re so brusque.”
It took concentration, but I made my next comment even more curt and dismissive — trying to play my role. “Don’t tell me you recycled the gun? Couldn’t you and your friends have used it on each other for target practice?”
“Oh, Mom, that’s old. Jacques and I used to do that back in dorm days.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Is there something I can do for you today? Or are you going to keep cluttering up my apartment?”
“Sorry about that,” she said, and shrugged. “It’s day twenty-nine. When a person’s got so few hours to live, what’s wrong with raising a little hell?” She rocked the hammock chair until the ropes creaked in the hook.
“Give me a break, Cheryl. If you had any intention of following through with this suicide petition, you’d be off somewhere all alone, and you’d stop bothering those of us who have lives to conduct.”
“Who have you been talking to? Dr. Branson? That sounds like her.”
“Ellen has helped me realize what I should have done with you a long time ago. I’ve decided to take her advice.”
I squinted at her, and finally pinned down what seemed strange about her looks. She wasn’t wearing the morph she’d favored lately. She’d gone back to the one I had most often given her during childhood, the one which I suppose qualified most as her own. She hadn’t used it much over the years.
“Dammit, Monica,” she said, practically spitting out the comment. “I mean it this time.”
“What is so bad about life, Cheryl? Why do you want to die?”
She stared as if I were crazy. “What’s not wrong? The planet’s overpopulated. The rules have all been around for hundreds of years. A nobody like me can’t make a place in the world.”
“You were eight years into an apprenticeship. You were making headway.”
“C’mon, Mom. It was interior decorating. The only reason I got as far as I did was that no one could tell when I did a bad job. Sort of like therapy.”
“It was something you stuck to. It was a sign of maturity. You can’t expect to get to master if you don’t stick with something.”
“Right. Get to master. What are the averages now? Thirty years of apprenticeship, fifty years as a journeyman, and then being a master doesn’t mean jackshit unless you’re so outstanding and kiss so much ass that your peers declare you an adept or a maestro. What the hell do eight years matter?”
“It’s the longest you have ever lasted,” I snapped.
Tears began to swim in the corners of her eyes. “You act like I mean as much to you as a turd you grunted out in the woods a hundred years ago. You don’t care if I do it, do you? You brought me into this fucked-up world and now you won’t even help me slide out. I’m glad I killed you!”
All I wanted was to stop here, and take her in my arms. But I forced the words out, though I was so cotton-mouthed they ripped my throat. “You’re right. I don’t care. I’ve given up, Cheryl. I hope you do it. I’ve made arrangements with the Reproduction Review Board. They qualified me for a new baby.”
Cheryl blinked through her tears. The hammock chair ceased swaying and quivered to a stop. She stared at me open-mouthed. “You can’t do that. Nobody gets more than one kid these days.” The sarcasm and stridency had left her voice.
“Sure I can,” I said. “Now that my request is on file, if you’re archived any time before you turn a hundred years of age, I can get reproductive dispensation. You’ll be categorized as an abortion.”
I waited for her reaction. I hadn’t raised
my voice, and now I stood calmly, maintaining my stern glare, holding back the shuddering in my bones much like the crew of the Enola Gay must have poised while their bomb plummeted toward Hiroshima.
She didn’t speak. She sat there wide-eyed, gulping air, tears streaming down her cheeks. Finally she whispered a single word, so softly I couldn’t hear her.
I thought nothing was happening, until I noticed a faint, bitter-almond undertone to the aroma of sea salt and hibiscus wafting from the window. “What’s that odor?” I asked. Suddenly my limbs sprouted lead weights.
“Cyanide,” Cheryl said in an utter monotone. “I’ve got my filters set for it. How about you?”
Of course I didn’t, because setting one’s filters to that degree removes all scents from the air. I hadn’t worried about poisons, since the nanodocs can usually render them harmless before they cause any suffering. But cyanide, as I recalled too late, is so fast that it’s easier for the little machines to let a person die, wait for the air to clear, and then revive the corpse.
“So long, Ma,” Cheryl said as stars flashed behind my eyes. Their light filled my vision, leaving me blind as my knees crashed to the floor. I was out before my head struck.
I woke up to the hiss of steam. Groaning, I rolled over to search for the source of the sound.
It was Jacques. He was enveloped in a cloud of mist. No doubt his docs were accelerating the thaw.
I scanned the room. Cheryl was gone, leaving her “friends” behind.
The first thing I did was toss the hanged girl over the balcony. Jacques followed, fingers and all. I didn’t give a hoot what the neighbors thought of bodies on the lawn.
Then I sat down, right on the carpet, too drained to make it to a chair. The shuddering started.
I’d done it. Dr. Branson would be proud of me. I’d called Cheryl’s bluff.
If it were a bluff.
The shuddering turned into sobbing. The tears burst out of me like rivers. My throat felt as if I’d swallowed thistles. I grabbed the end of the carpet and tried to wipe my face, but all that did was soak the tassels. I cried until I couldn’t breathe, and then I cried some more.
When I could finally stand up, and later, when I could finally walk, I stumbled into my bedroom. I recoded the picture frame on the nightstand to the scene I’d kept there for the past half century or so: my daughter, blowing out the candles of her birthday cake as she turned four years old.
Daughter
Earth is glorious from a hundred miles up. At least, I’ve always thought so. Especially when I’ve exited my pod, told the craft to return to the planet, and I can just float there, suspended above that big blue sphere with nothing but a body shield, a cartridge of oxygen, and my surfboard to keep me company.
This was one vista I’d never shared with anyone, not even Jacques or Giselle. Oh, they knew about Earth surfing. After all, it had been a fad for centuries. Jacques had even told me about the portable scanner I could use to record and transmit my cusp-of-death configuration to the Net, so that when I was reconstituted my new body would remember as much of the emotional high of the experience as possible. The two of them indulged in the sport as often as I.
But never with me. This was my own, my favorite, my private means of suicide.
I hadn’t activated the scanner this time. Why should I record experiences that weren’t going to be plugged into a new body? This was it.
Oregon and the western coast of North America had just emerged from the terminator. Morning, the thirtieth day. If my eyesight were good enough, I could’ve spotted my mom down there.
Not that Monica mattered. She hadn’t answered my Link call when I arrived up here. She really didn’t care.
“Access suicide petition,” I murmured.
The Net’s clear tenor voice responded with shocking speed. “Suicide petition active. Day thirty. Upon your confirmation, your nanodocs will be disengaged and your scan will be transferred to archival storage.”
Fog shrouded the Golden Gate. The jet stream poured its usual funnel of rain clouds across Puget Sound. The Willamette Valley warmed to the rays of the newly risen sun. I’d lost sight of Portland as dawn had doused the lights of the city. Now it hid in the greens and browns of the continent, as if it didn’t exist at all.
What was one city in the history of a planet five billion years old? What was one more woman in the miasma of the human race?
No one would miss me. Just tag me as a fetus, aborted in its two hundred forty-ninth trimester. A statistic. Check me off the list — it’s the only way left for humanity to make room for new folks, not counting spewing them into the colony worlds.
So big a planet. So little a me.
“Do you confirm?” asked the disembodied voice.
My surfboard itched for the press of my Velcro-soled boots. My mind filled with the memory of the heat glowing just outside my shield, the Earth looming below, larger and larger. No matter how many times I do it, the anticipation of death sends the tingle down my spine like ultimate sex, as dependable as a narcotic. And then there’s the cool bliss of the Big White Light.
I wonder if there’s a God? Is St. Peter pissed off at how few people have been streaming through those pearly gates lately?
Hey, Pete, here I come. Don’t be lonely.
“Confirm petition,” I said.
“Petition granted. Your nanodocs have been disengaged and your scan has been archived. Permanent suicide is now your option.”
I licked my lips and took my stance on the board. With those ominous words, I had become the proverbial acrobat, treading the tightrope without a net. Sweat pooled at the end of my nose, prevented from dropping off by the proximity of my shield.
I aimed the board so that the tip obscured my view of Oregon. Too bad I couldn’t target my mother’s apartment — not that anything solid would make it far enough to create an impact crater. I wondered if she were awake yet. Wasn’t much chance she’d stayed up late thinking about me.
So much ocean down there. The amniotic fluid of the whole planet.
My eyes widened. I cued the Net. “Access Reproduction Review Board database. Do you have a birth request from Monica Taylor, I.D. 555-94-1830-66-291?”
“Negative. No such request on file.”
That sneaky bitch. She’d actually had me believing it.
Did it make any difference that she was bluffing? I was still up here, at the upper reaches of the atmosphere. I still had a decision to make.
Maybe I could hold off for a few weeks. With my docs out of commission, I could apply to become a Christian Scientist or a member of the Society of Mortals. Giselle had done it once. She’d said it was the most exciting period of her life, knowing she could really croak at any time, even by accident.
Mom would be left wondering exactly when I’d actually cash in. Or when I’d strike next. Or—
Who was I kidding? I was talking about only one thing here. Life was rearing its fuzzy little head in front of my carefully painted vision. I’d lost the moment. The worst part of it was, if I couldn’t do it now, under these circumstances, when could I?
Probably never.
“Erase petition,” I said, sighing. “Reactivate docs and retrieve scan.”
“Acknowledged.”
I’d always thought I would do it someday. I always thought it was just a matter of time. Suddenly all those six thousand temporary suicides seemed like some hoary old game, a behavior based on a false assumption about myself.
I had no idea where to go from here. I didn’t really like it. But I knew who I had to ask for advice. I had a hint I could reach her now.
I activated the Link. “Mom?” I asked.
Her voice came through quietly and clearly, unaccompanied by a visual. “I’m here.”
Her hoarse, strained tone put an uncontrollable quiver into my smile. “Mom, can we talk?”
“Yes. If you’ll let Ellen be there later on.”
An image came into my head of Monica staying up throu
gh the night, pacing, asking the Net every five seconds if I’d cancelled the petition, unblocking the Link the instant I did so. My throat ached with a sweet, powerful tightness.
“Get some rest, Mom. I’ll be there soon. I’ve got a couple of things to do first.”
“I’ll be here.”
I smiled wryly at the big, beautiful planet that had given me so much shit, and would give me lots more. Only a crazy woman would go back. Sighing, I activated the scanner. Aiming the surf board at the night-shrouded Pacific, I glided into the atmosphere. I made one hell of a meteor.
And within minutes, I was reborn.
Return to Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION TO “TERMITES”
Identifying the genesis of a story isn’t always possible, but I know where this one came from. The underlying scientific premise is the brainchild of Robert A. Fleming, friend, maniac, and a true patron of the arts.
Bob works at the cutting edge of technology. There are only a handful of people on the planet capable of persuading chips, boards, optical circuits, and non-sinusoidal wave generators to do what he and his wife Cherie Kushner make them do. I wish I could properly convey what it is like looking over their shoulders as they make improbabilities into reality. Perhaps the process is best typified by one of Bob’s stock explanations: It’s called pulling a miracle out of your ass.
This is a way of saying that Bob doesn’t have time to write his own science fiction stories, which causes him some frustration. Hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t come across something that makes him think, “What a story that would make.” Perhaps someday he’ll indulge the muse; meanwhile, he’s not the sort of man to let his harried schedule thwart him. He tries to get other people to write the stories.
Sometimes he is very convincing.
His persuasiveness snagged Vernor Vinge, which is why you’ll find considerable mention in A Deepness in the Sky and “Fast Times at Fairmont High” of “localizers” — technology that Bob and Cherie invented. Later in this collection you’ll find “The Cookie Jar,” my own exploration of a future shaped by the existence and use of those devices. But the first of Bob’s arm-twisting happened in 1986, and led to this story.