by Laura Lam
I swallow. This is all in my file from when he scanned the VeriChip in my wrist. “Silvercloud Solutions.”
Officer Oloyu makes a show of perusing my file on his blank, white tablet. “That’s a subset of Sudice, right?”
“Yes.” I don’t know why he’s pretending he doesn’t know. Sudice is the biggest company in Pacifica, with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland and Honolulu. They supply the drug Zeal to all Pacifica states, and have most tech in the city patented.
“It says here you helped design the VivaFog.” Those machines have been my life’s work for the past five years: the machines that take energy from the ever-present fog around the bay and relay it to the coastal apartments. We’re going to try and expand to the maritime district this year.
“I was one of the team that did, yes,” I respond. Why isn’t he asking the questions he really wants the answer to? Beneath the table, I press my knees hard to stop them knocking together.
Officer Oloyu isn’t saying anything out of order, but everything in his body language screams: I suspect you, either of murder or accessory to it. I wish I still had that microexpression overlay downloaded to my ocular implants, but I deleted it months ago. I didn’t like what it told me about people.
“That’s impressive,” Officer Oloyu says. I’m not sure whether or not I sense the underlying subtext I often do from people who know my past: for someone who grew up in the cult of Mana’s Hearth.
“Thank you,” I tell him, meeting his eyes.
“We contacted your employer, but it seems you quit your job today and have plans to leave the country.”
“Yes, that’s correct. That’s been in the works for months. It’s not a sudden decision.” I feel a flutter of nerves, deep in my stomach. It’s a coincidence, but it doesn’t look good.
“We’re unclear if this is premeditated or a crime of passion.”
“I had nothing to do with this. Whatever this is. And I’m sure my sister didn’t, either.”
He pauses, considering me. The overhead lighting leaves half his face in shadow. I look down at my stone-cold coffee. I want water, but I don’t ask him for it.
“Did your sister seem different at all, the last time you saw her? Distressed in any way?”
“No. She seemed the same as usual. Laughing, joking. We went to an Ethiopian restaurant in the Mission.”
His gaze goes distant as he makes a mental note with his implants.
This is my first lie to the police. She seemed thinner, she didn’t laugh. She picked at her food, when usually Tila has a voracious appetite. I kept asking her what was wrong, but she said she’d just been working too many late nights at the club. The lie fell from my mouth before I thought about it, and I can’t take it back.
They’ve mapped my brain to see if I’m lying. A model floats above our heads, delicate and transparent, dotted with neuron clusters like stars. Oloyu glances up to check. Between my mechanical heart not growing as excited as a flesh one and my Hearth training, nothing happens. I could lie with impunity. If they map Tila, she can too.
“So nothing unusual over the last few weeks? No signs she was keeping anything from you? You two must be close.” Again, I can hear from his tone what he really means: close enough that if one of you did it, the other would know about it.
“Closer than you can ever imagine,” I say, my voice sharpening with fear. I don’t want him to see he’s struck a nerve, but by the flint of his eyes, he knows he has. I decide I’m not going to let him scare me, even if terror still rolls in my stomach. Even though I hate the Hearth and all it stands for, another one of Mana-ma’s sayings comes to me: They only have power over you if you let them.
“Does your sister have any enemies?” Oloyu leans forward. I can’t stand anyone that close to me unless it’s Tila or someone I know extremely well. But I lean forward on my elbows, right in his face, ignoring the mirrored window behind him and whoever watches me through it. I’m still scared, but I haven’t let it paralyze me.
“Everyone loves Tila. She can go buy food and make a new friend.” That’s true. If we take a shuttle somewhere for a holiday, I read, ignoring those around me. Tila will become fast friends with whoever is sitting next to her: an old man with a white beard, a new mother and her squalling baby, and once a Buddhist monk in his saffron robes.
She can make enemies as well: people who don’t like her because of her blithe way of speaking, her easy enthusiasm. I’m sure there are probably a few other hostesses at the club who are jealous of her. She can charm clients with a half-lidded glance and she often crows to me about how she receives the lion’s share of the tips. Tila seems to know what it is each person wants and reflects that back to them, flirting by acting like one of the ribald men as easily as playing the coquettish minx. Heaven knows where she’s learned all that. I sure haven’t.
“Nobody at all?” Officer Oloyu presses.
I shake my head. “None that come to mind, no. Sorry I can’t be more helpful.” I’m not sorry I haven’t given them anything to incriminate my sister. Or at least I hope I haven’t.
He presses his lips together. “Now then. The question you must be expecting: where were you at 1700 hours this evening?”
“On the way home from work on the MUNI.” My voice has stopped shaking, and I feel as though I’m no longer attached to my body. That I’m just a floating head. I have taken full control of my emotions, like Mana-ma always taught us to do in the Hearth.
“Which line do you take?”
“Clement Lot.”
“You do understand we’ll be checking the cameras.”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
Officer Oloyu narrows his eyes. At first, he thought he had me. Now, he thinks I’m being secretive, and he’s right. But there’s not much more he can do without concrete proof, and I’m not giving him anything. Even if there was anything to give.
“Can I have any details of the case, or is it all confidential?” I ask. “Maybe if I understand what’s happened I can think of someone who might wish to harm my sister. Whose body did they find? Was it a guest of the club?” I’m desperate for more information. Anything to help piece together what happened tonight. Murder. The word keeps pulsing through my mind, until it doesn’t even seem like a word anymore.
“We can’t name the victim,” Officer Oloyu says. The unspoken: not to you.
Thanks for nothing. “Right. Well, if you can’t tell me anything, and I have nothing to tell you, is there anything else you need? Or can I go home and clean up the mess you made of my apartment?”
“I don’t appreciate your tone, Miss Collins,” Oloyu says. “You don’t seem overly upset by tonight’s events.”
Fuck you, I want to say. You don’t have the first clue how I’m feeling. Instead, I look at him calmly. “Am I free to go?”
“For now.”
“Good.” I stand and clutch my purse, and then I bend down and look him in the eye. I’m pleased to see him move back slightly. “I’m not upset because I’m sure she’s as much of a victim in this as whoever died tonight.” I lean back and pull my collar down. It’s a good way to unnerve others. In San Francisco, where everyone has made such an effort to appear flawless, nobody likes to see such obvious signs of imperfection. Tila taught me the trick. For all she changed her face and hair to not look like me, she kept the scar.
Oloyu looks at the scar with a mixture of fascination and embarrassment.
“You can’t spend sixteen years with someone, every minute of every day, and not know if they’re capable of murder or not. I’ll do whatever it takes to clear her name.” I push my collar up and walk out. His eyes on my back make the hairs on my neck prickle.
* * *
Officer Oloyu follows me from the interrogation room to the hovercar, and we rise and fly along the coast of the bay toward my apartment in Inner Sunset. The last thing I want to do is see more of him, and I wonder why a senior policeman is taking the time to chauffeur me back instead
of some rookie. I haven’t seen any other police officers except for the two who took Tila away—it’s almost as if they don’t want anyone else to see me.
I ignore Oloyu and stare out the window. It’s full night by now, and San Francisco glitters below us. The sight of it helps me forget my anxiety and terror, at least for a moment.
I love this city. It’s the complete opposite of Mana’s Hearth. In the Hearth, the lake is ink-black at night. In San Francisco, the algae farms make the bay glow green. To my right is Angel Island, and the ruined Alcatraz, the building too decayed by the salt and wind to visit, and the man-made islands where the rich live in their sumptuous houses. The Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge lead toward the city skyline. Billboards advertising Sudice products flash their garish colors: implant upgrades, a new Zeal lounge downtown, the virtual reality center next to Union Square Mall. The car passes between buildings: greenhouse skyscrapers with their lush, forest-like interiors, multi-level apartment towers, most of the windows lit, small silhouettes staring out the windows toward the bay.
Scattered throughout the city are revenants risen from the Earth after the Great Quake of 2055—antiquities of architecture preserved and joined with their modern counterparts in a hybrid of old and new: Coit Tower, the skyscrapers on California Street and near the Embarcadero, the old iconic Ferry Building at the base of the newly built air hangars above and the piers jutting out into the gentle waves of the bay. And there, just coming into sight, the TransAm Pyramid, twice as large as the old Transamerica Pyramid. I can’t look away from the glowing top floor, home to Club Zenith.
San Francisco.
Our new home after we’d left the Hearth. At first, we’d hated it. It was too different, too new, and we’d had to learn about its ways while struggling with our newly separated status. Eventually, we’d grown to love it. The freedom it gave us. The opportunities. Now, I fear I’ll grow to hate it again.
Officer Oloyu clears his throat. I turn to him, trying to bring something approximating a smile to my face, but it fails.
“I’ll tell you a little about the case,” he says, grudgingly. “I’ve been given the go-ahead by my superior.”
Why the change? “All right,” I say, slowly. The flashing lights of the city play across his face, catching in his eyes.
“You are not permitted to share this information with anyone. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“The victim has not been formally identified yet, but another hostess says they called him Vuk. He was tall, muscular, wore a sharp suit. Tipped very well. Spent a lot of time in the Zeal lounge. Tila was one of his favorites.”
“Vuk,” I say, tasting the name on my lips. The retinal display of my implants tells me the name means “wolf” in Serbo-Croatian. I send the text away. “Why are you telling me this?”
“We want you to come back in tomorrow,” he says. The hardness has left him again. I prefer him without it—it doesn’t suit him. Too forced.
“Why?”
“You’ll see. Please come to the station tomorrow at 0900. Take the MUNI. Come through the back entrance.”
“This is not a request?”
“No.” We’ve reached my apartment. He sets the hovercar down on the balcony. I sigh at the sight of my broken sliding glass door. At least the worst of the rain has stopped.
I get out without saying goodbye, stepping into my damp living room. I turn around, watching Oloyu lift the police car away.
“Vuk,” I say again. “Who were you?” A rich man, if he frequented the club, who liked to plug into the Zeal virtual world fantasies. I can just see a Sudice billboard for Zeal, flashing through the fog. A woman in a Chair, wires hooked up to her arms and temples, eyes closed, a smile on her face. Above her head, her dreams come to life—she’s clad in armour, and fighting a sinuous monster. The billboard blinks again. She’s flipping head over feet, wearing a skintight star-spangled uniform, an Olympic athlete. One last blink, and the tagline: Find your Zeal for life. What will you dream today?
What were Vuk’s dreams when he was plugged into that Chair, and did Tila join him in them?
I look down over the city again, wondering how I’ll find out who he was and how he entangled Tila in this mess.
THREE
TILA
They’ve given me an old-fashioned paper notebook to write my last will and testament, with a pencil blunt enough I can’t kill myself with it. I’m sure I still could, if I wanted to.
I refused a tablet. I don’t want them sneaking and reading this as I write. So here I am, with my paper and pencil. I’m more used to this than most people in the city—out in the Hearth, there are no fancy gadgets and very little technology.
I’m not going to write my last will and testament. What’s the point? I don’t have much to leave and my only next of kin is Taema, so everything goes to her. I couldn’t send any of my stuff to my parents at the Hearth even if I wanted to, since we’re apostate and all that.
So I’m just sort of scribbling, seeing what will come out. It passes the time, I guess. There’s nothing else to do. The cell is cold and boring, with everything gray and beige, though I do have a window that shows a tiny patch of blue sky. Maybe writing this will distract me, at least a little, from the fact they’re going to kill me soon.
There’s no point sugar-coating it—it’ll happen. My lawyer is half heartedly trying to put up a defense, buy me more time, but I don’t know why he bothers. The trial’s in a few weeks. Though can you really call it a trial if there’s no jury, just some judge deciding your fate? The government is keeping it all hush-hush. The media aren’t meant to know—most of the people here don’t even know who I am or what I’m meant to have done. I overheard the guards talking about it. I’m not in a normal prison. They don’t even have prisons in San Francisco anymore, there’s so little crime. I’m locked away somewhere else, but we didn’t travel long so I think I’m still in Northern California. Maybe they took me to the Sierras? The air seems colder and crisper.
If it ever does get out, I wonder if they’ll let me read the news feeds. They’ll call me all sorts of names. Some will be true. Some won’t.
The judge will say I’m a criminal, and then they’ll put me in stasis. Freeze me like a popsicle, and then I might as well be dead. That sounds flippant, I know, but that seems to be the only way I can write about it without crying.
Shit, never mind. There’s tear stains on the paper now.
Putting people in stasis is Pacifica’s answer to capital punishment. They’re not killing them, but cryogenically freezing criminals. It happened a lot more in the early days of Pacifica, after the United States split up. Now, maybe only a dozen people, tops, are put into stasis every year. It’s only for the really hopeless cases, those who don’t respond to Zeal therapy and will never be redeemed. I guess they think I’m unredeemable.
Hardly anyone who goes into stasis comes back out. It does happen—some tireless lawyer will discover someone frozen was actually innocent. They come out of it, disoriented, to find years have passed them by. One woman was taken out after thirty years. Her husband and mother were gone, most of her friends had moved away. She ended up committing suicide, because she felt the rest of her life she got back wasn’t worth living.
How would I react if I was frozen and woke up in fifty years to discover Taema was old and frail, or gone entirely?
I don’t really have to worry about it, though. People coming out of stasis has only happened a handful of times in forty years. Not good odds.
Then there are the outages. Whole wings of people in stasis losing power, and they die before anyone can fix it. So convenient, right? The government always claims it’s an accident. They promise to install a back-up server. Then they never do. One day, I’m pretty sure there’ll be an outage on everyone in stasis. Whoops. Away they go.
Thinking about living without Taema has weirded me out. I can’t get it out of my head. I’m alone in this cell, and my sister’s miles away. I’m s
till not used to being alone, even ten years after we separated. Tomorrow is our surgery anniversary. Whoo. The first sixteen years of my life were spent looking over my sister’s shoulder, or resting cheek-to-cheek with her to look at someone together.
I wonder sometimes if I started on this road as soon as they took the knife to us. She’s my better half, Taema. She’s the one with the sensible head on her shoulders, who would talk me out of doing stupid shit as kids because she didn’t want to be drawn into my trouble. She was usually drawn in anyway, though. It’s not like she had much of a choice.
If the news does get out, she’ll have to dodge paparazzi drones left and right—how many alleged murderers have an identical twin they were once conjoined with? And grew up in that crazy cult in the redwoods across the bay? They’ll have a field day. At least she’s not here in the cell with me, and she’s not going into stasis when if I do, so that’s something.
Ugh. I’m almost tempted to crumple this whole thing up and flush it down the toilet. I’m not stupid. Even though this is paper, they can read whatever I write on here and they’re going to rake through it with a fine-tooth comb to see what I’m trying to hide. When I’m in the shower or something, they’ll sneak in here and read it.
WON’T YOU, ASSHOLES?
It’s a waste of time. I might as well tell you now. There’s not going to be any confession in here. Don’t hold your breath.
The guards just dropped off my food. Boring meals of algae and vat-grown meat. The guards seem to like the look of me. Men always do. Plenty of women as well. But then their eyes drop to my chest, to the white scar against my brown skin, peeking over the collar of my prison uniform. They can’t hide their fear at what it represents: that I am only half of who I used to be.
* * *
I’ve just been sitting here the last few hours, trying to think of what to write next. It’s dusk outside now, and the stars are coming out one by one in that little patch of sky by the window. It reminds me of the fireflies Taema and I used to chase in Mana’s Hearth when we were little. We were good at catching them. We walked sideways then, like the lake crabs, but we never slowed each other down. One of us would reach out and sweep the fireflies into jars, take them back to the house to light our bedroom, and let them out a few hours later. I miss those days.