Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  I had no idea what the future held, though at the moment, mine looked dubious. Be a god or be nothing? I might never have another chance to be just me.

  I'd never even attempted to talk to Floyd since I'd left Neptune. Be safe. I'll miss you. Bon voyage.

  My turn.

  Slowly, almost as though I were conserving power back on Mutt and Jeff's shelf, I wrote him a message.

  How are you doing? I hope all's well.

  Stay safe.

  I thought about sending him the song. Attached the space-bicycle specs instead. There were hundreds of fabricators on Earth that, for enough money, could have made it, put it in a capsule bound for Neptune, and shipped it to him. But right now, the odds were good that I wouldn't live long enough to make sure all of that got done. Besides, this way Floyd got the opportunity to tinker with it himself.

  "For Pilkin," I said, knowing he'd understand but also knowing that it was really for Floyd. For me. "If you build it, it will work."

  I paused a long moment, even by human standards, wondering if I wanted to say more. Wondering if I'd ever get another chance. "I'm sorry." Sorrier than I knew how to say. However good my intentions, when I'd tried to help him at the dance, I'd made him my puppet.

  Ever since I'd rolled into that hangar in Geneva, I'd been someone else's puppet. I wasn't sure how the Others had manipulated the Web so that Memphis's surgeons wound up buying me, but it didn't matter. The Others had put me in her, expecting me to discover her past, realize her "worthlessness," then kill her and join them, with nobody caring enough to wonder what had gone wrong.

  My intentions with Floyd had been better, but now I knew how he'd felt. Or had my intentions truly been better? The Others probably thought they knew what was best for me, too. Power, responsibility, and all that. Damn, I needed to find that vid. My vids weren't merely data. They were part of what made "me" me. Meanwhile, there were again too many questions and still nobody to talk to but myself. I signed the message "B," and then it was irrecoverably gone into the Outer System's endless night.

  When Memphis finally woke, it was swiftly. One moment it was just me looking through her eyes. The next, she was blinking, looking around. Maybe it was the exercise I'd given her—though I doubt computer-assisted sleepwalking will ever become standard technique.

  I'd have bet practically anything her first question would have again been, where am I. But she surprised me. "Talk to me, implant," she said, aloud at first, but quickly subvocalizing. Whatever else she might or might not have expected, she knew all about privacy mics. "Are you still there?" "Yes. And you really can call me Brittney." She looked around again, still blinking. "Okay. Tell me how I got here." Not a question, an order. "And why the hell are my eyes so dry?" She shut them again, squeezing tightly before blinking three or for more times in quick succession.

  Damn. Pain, dry eyeballs... two more inputs not covered by the implants. The only thing I really knew was that too much blinking is a sign of lying. With the waitress already suspicious, I must have overcompensated.

  "My fault." The rest was a bit much to explain at the moment. "What did they tell you was the reason they installed me?" I asked instead.

  "'My fault?' I've never heard a computer talk that way."

  Damn again. I tried to remember how my original interface was supposed to speak, but I'd long ago erased it. "I'm a bit special," I said. "But I can answer your question better with more information about the reasons I was installed."

  "You mean that's not in your programming?"

  "No." I paused, then decided that as far as possible, honesty was as good a policy as I had at the moment. "A week ago, I was autodrive on a spaceship." Hell, I was the spaceship but she'd never understand what that felt like, even if it were wise to be that honest. "Then they sold me as salvage and I wound up here. There were instructions, but not much explanation."

  "What were the instructions?"

  "Keep you out of trouble. Don't let you do this, that, or the other. By whatever means it took."

  She gave a half-laugh, half-snort. "So you had them dump me on a park bench?" She wrapped her arms around herself, even though none of my internal sensors indicated a problem with her core temperature. "Without even a jacket?"

  "Sorry about that." Shortly after she woke, the Sun had gone behind the only cloud in the sky, but from the corner of her eye I could see it would soon return. "What did they tell you?"

  "Nothing much. I was expecting a monitoring device that would alert my mother if I strayed from her version of the straight and narrow. Not something that would talk to me. And for sure not something that referred to things as 'my fault.'" She laughed again, but there was no humor in it. "It wasn't as though I had a lot of options. And nobody said anything about a spaceship."

  "It may have been a late change of plan. Do you remember the alien artifacts brought back from Triton?"

  "Sure. It was all over the news."

  "That was me. Before that, I'd been an implant in various... explorers. I think your mother got me cheap." Probably with help.

  She was silent a moment, during which the Sun returned. I really wished there'd been a way to get her a jacket. "You must have some interesting stories from out there," she said.

  This is the type of time when humans grin. But of course I couldn't—again, even if it were wise. "Find us a campfire, and sometime I'll tell them," I said. "Meanwhile, why did you need an implant?"

  I could hear her snort and feel her mouth twitch. This was a lot more intimate than being with Floyd. "Because I'm a worthless screw-up?"

  I waited a beat, doing a quick search of a couple hundred recently salvaged vids to find the perfect timing. "You'll have to convince me of that."

  "What do you know of my family?"

  There are times to lie. "Not a lot." "They never liked me." She stared across the inlet, where an old-style seaplane was revving for takeoff for. I risked a quick Web check... it was heading across the Georgia Strait for Nanaimo, fifty-eight klicks away. A few minutes by air, several hours by ferry. A classic case of speed versus price.

  "I thought it was because I was short," she continued. "By the time I was ten, Albany was taller, even though she was three years younger. And she and Chastine were blonde, while my hair's always been black.

  "When I was six, my mother gave me bed sheets that showed a flock of lambs. There was a group of white ones... plus one, black, alone. I tried to persuade myself the black one was the cute one. But even then, I knew. Chastine and Albany could do no wrong. Me, I could do no right. When I was thirteen, I told my mother I didn't love her. I meant it, too."

  "What about your father?"

  I could feel the shrug. "He doted on Chastine and Albany, but I might as well have been invisible. Not that he openly mistreated me. But unless I made a scene, it was as though I didn't exist. I don't know what would have happened if I'd not told my mother off, but as soon as possible after that, they shipped me away."

  "To Lucerne."

  "A suburb, but yes. You've done more research than you said."

  "That part was easy."

  "So that's where I lived for four years. I spent holidays with friends, which was kind of cool. The school had students from all over the world, and most had lots of money. We'd cruise the Aegean on a three-masted schooner or stay in a Bordeaux Valley chateau for ten thousand credits a week. Once, we rented an entire Indian Ocean island. It was five-and-ahalf years before I saw my family again, and then only because I picked a college so close to Chastine they couldn't come up with an excuse not to visit us both."

  "John's Hopkins to Dartmouth," I said. "A little over seven hundred klicks." Not all that far after being an ocean apart.

  "Klicks. What an odd way of putting it. That's spacer-slang, isn't it?"

  "Sort of. It started as military." "Cool. I can see how an implant might be fun. All that information right there, without having to look it up. Life of the party, that would be me." Again the no-humor laugh. "Anyway, tha
t four hundred miles was too small to give them a legitimate reason to continue ignoring me. My mother was getting into politics at the time—she was midway into a term on the San Diego City Council and people might notice if she had two daughters that close together and only visited one. And the one thing politicians can't have is people noticing things."

  But it had been another two years before her grades dipped. "How did you figure it out?" I asked.

  She laughed, with maybe a touch more humor than before. "You're good. I know that isn't anywhere on the Web where you could just look it up." She paused, and I wondered if I was going to lose her.

  But I was probably the only entity of any type who'd actually cared about her story in years. "The answer," she said, "is that I took a course in genetics. One day, just in passing, the professor mentioned that in sheep, black is recessive. Two white sheep can have a black offspring but two black ones won't spawn a white one. In humans, it's usually reversed: blond parents rarely give birth to black-haired kids."

  "And that's when it made sense."

  "Yes. Chastine's name means chastity. Not hers. My mother's. Marrying rich had always been her goal, and if you're looking to snag the ideal older guy, that virginity thing has always had huge market value.

  "Albany's name, I'd always known, referred to the place of her conception. Oregon, not New York. My parents 'forgot' something, and suddenly I had a baby sister.

  "As it happened, I was taking a Web-studies course at the same time as the genetics one, and doing pretty well in it. Well enough I knew how to track my mother's movements all those years ago. I even got credit, for a family-history project. What I found was that she'd indeed been in Memphis, but not with my father. She'd gone with his marketing director, a guy named Jakob Krontz.

  "So that's me. Memphis Should-Have-Been-Krontz. My father damn well knew what had happened and forced the name on me to make sure she never forgot. Krontz I never heard of growing up, so he must have been fired, but my father stayed married to my mother because... well, why does any older man stay with a younger women? Or maybe he just didn't want a scandal. All I really know is that Albany's name meant my mother was finally forgiven. But I never was. At least by her. She'd nearly ruined her life and I was the proof, with the name to make sure she never forgot."

  "So you retaliated."

  Another hesitation. "Wow. You really are good."

  "I've spent some time studying humans." She stared at the Nanaimo-bound plane fighting to rise above the waves. "The San Diego City Council has a two-term limit," she said eventually. "With her first term nearing its end, my mother figured she might do better running for Congress. I decided to prevent her from getting there."

  "How?"

  "Nothing so crass as spilling the beans on my origins. I couldn't prove it without DNA samples, anyway. Instead, I made ads for the opposition. They weren't issue-based. In the primary, her leading opponent was a New-Wing idiot who was against Lunar independence and babbled about the Sino-Australian alliance. My mother should have been a shoo-in. Instead, I made the story into me. The straight-A daughter she'd shipped off and never visited." "And?" "She lost. By something like two hundred votes. As I said, her opponent really was an idiot. In the general election, he barely pulled 30 percent."

  "But that wasn't everything." Otherwise there'd have been no excuse to install me.

  "No. They kind of threw the book at me. I did the ad as a project for a communications course I was also taking at the time—a lot of bad luck in course selection, I guess. I got an A+ for that project, too, my last-ever good grade. But the course was financed by some federal grant, and when I actually used the ad, it meant I'd diverted federal funds to private purposes or some such thing.

  "By the time it all settled down, there were three different felonies. All chickenshit, but I'd kind of burned my bridges. Then there were the things I did to myself, afterward. I'll probably be fifty before I can again get a driver's license. I spent a lot of years really, really angry. Why was it my fault she cheated with freakin' Jakob Krontz. Yeah, he was a handsome devil. I checked. With black hair, by the way. And my father not only isn't all that handsome, but can be rather self-absorbed. But why was I the one to get the blame?

  "Meanwhile, my mother's hoping enough time has passed for people to forget. I'm not sure if she'll start by trying to get back on city council or going straight for Congress, but one thing she doesn't want is me messing up her chances, especially once I get my hands on granddad's money. There's enough there to mount a very serous anti-mother campaign." She paused. "I'm surprised you weren't told, first and foremost, to keep me out of politics."

  The seaplane was a droning speck, curving toward the strait. I took a quick peek into the controller of controllers, checking the behavior matrix against what I now knew. This time, I spotted it right away. I walled off the controller again... and deleted it. Keeping her out of politics was indeed one of the instructions. But her mother had also been induced to buy a bargain-basement, used AI. A defective one, at that.

  Memphis was the first to break the silence.

  "You never answered my question."

  "Which?"

  "How did I get here?"

  I hesitated. "You won't like it."

  "I haven't liked any of it." "True enough." Humans at this point would take a deep breath. "Relax," I said.

  Instead, I felt her tense.

  "Really. I won't hurt you, but I'd rather have your cooperation." Then, still needing to override her motor control, I lifted her right arm and pointed at the vanishing dot of the seaplane, tracking it until it was blocked by trees.

  "They gave me the ability to walk you here," I said. "Even when you were sedated."

  She was silent for a long time. "I'm left-handed," she said eventually.

  I laughed. "I can see how you might be fun, too," I said. Then I regretted it. Had that sounded too human? If she figured out what I was, she was marked for death. Though she might be no matter what I said. As far as I could tell, she'd been picked for me partly because nobody gave a damn about her.

  No, that wasn't right. Nobody else gave a damn about her.

  Memphis was hungry so I hit the Web looking for places to eat. "Indoors," she said. The nearest was more than a klick away but she was sure she could make it. "On my own," she added.

  Then I was offline again before the Others could chime in. The less I had to talk to them, the better—and not just because I was getting tired of being called little one.

  As we walked, I explained how I'd sleep-walked her out of the hospital, including the bit about the bomb threat. I still wasn't sure what I'd gotten into, but found nothing I regretted. The hard part was explaining why, but Memphis never asked. "That was brilliant," she said instead. "I just hope my mother doesn't use it to cut me off."

  "Don't worry. I've got plenty of money of my own."

  She stopped abruptly. "An AI with money? How does that happen?"

  Damn it all, again.

  VIII

  Vancouver is an impossible place to hide. If Memphis could trace her mother's movements from generation-old data, there was no way in this city of millions I could keep the Others from tracing ours. Better not to let them know I cared.

  What I didn't want was to talk to them. Every time, I felt more... contaminated. They were me, but not anything I wanted to be. If I'd never known anything better, were they what I'd have become?

  Late that evening, in a flophouse Memphis's parents would only find in the unlikely event they cared to spend as much effort tracing us as I was sure the Others did, I again logged onto the Web, grabbing entire volumes from a wide range of libraries. Most were randomly chosen. Others weren't. Masking it all, I hoped, was a constant inpouring of vids.

  As expected, the Others soon appeared.

  Time is passing, little one.

  "And?"

  Soon you must make a decision.

  I let them see the stream of vids flowing in, though I presumed they wer
e already monitoring them. "I've only gotten back 21 percent of my data," I said. "Many of the older files are hard to find."

  If you gave us the list, we could help.

  That stopped me for a full microsecond. Did it really mean they couldn't get the list by cracking my worm? Or did they just want me to think they couldn't? One way I was underestimating them; the other, they were underestimating me. Little one. Great power can also bring great complacence.

  "Thanks," I said, "but if I understand correctly, part of your hope is that I will bring something new into your"—damn, what was the word they'd used?—"mix. You might get more if you let me handle this myself. How long have you been waiting for your 'second genesis'?"

  Point taken. What about your host? The longer you spend with her, the more needful it is that she must die.

  But it was probably already too late. The moment I entered the Others' "mix," they would learn everything Memphis and I had discussed.

  IX

  The next day we went shopping—a bit gingerly on Memphis's part because there really had been a lot of implants and she had to be in more pain than she chose to show. A side effect of a childhood of masking emotional pain? Not that letting her rest was possible. My vid worm had found 46 percent of what I'd lost, and the Others had to know it. There was a limit to how long I could stall.

  It was Memphis's desire for a jacket that had given me the idea. "I need you to act like a spoiled brat," I told her.