“Just answer me, Alexa … and then I’ll tell you all about my grand plan with the secret spy daughter I planted two decades ago, through magic and psychic powers of forethought, while your back was turned.”
And then it clicked. Alexa fought to keep the realization from her eyes, but her house of straw came crashing down anyway.
February through June of 2039 was when that farce of a summit had been held — the one in Bermuda. The Eastern representatives had shown up along with the NAU representatives, but the entire event had been a joke. Nobody had expected peace with the murderous Easterners to be possible, and there had been a strong feeling of “too soon” about the entire thing, given that only a few years had passed since the NAU had been sinking approaching East ships filled with immigrants to (so said the NAU) “enact triage.”
The NAU had treated the whole summit as a media spectacle, sending people who had global appeal but no genuine authority — like renowned writer and thinker Alexa Mathis, and popular scientists. Quasi-celebrities, instead of diplomats and negotiators.
Predictably, no progress had been made. The summit had been little more than months of vacation in the sun, as all sides pretended to be considering each other’s point of view.
“Oh.” Alexa’s hand wanted to cover her mouth, but she wouldn’t allow it.
“Was anyone else there with you?” said Clive. “Anyone charming and British?”
“Shit.” Alexa knew exactly what he was saying, and why even her bulletproof evidence was suddenly riddled with holes.
“I have a big dick, darling,” said Clive, his boyish smile returning, “but even I can’t get a girl pregnant from an ocean away.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Brad’s holograph was off. The absence of a visible projection wasn’t permanent, but Chloe didn’t want him over her shoulder for this.
She’d grown used to his presence in a way that wasn’t entirely comfortable. She didn’t need him to use The Beam, which was supposedly what O had provided him for. She felt at home using gloves to manipulate a holographic web, setting up a rolling projection and walking through it, matching her mode of search to the subject at hand and her present disposition. Brad was like a README document: worth that first glance, then no longer necessary.
Still, Chloe liked knowing he was there. He wasn’t truly Brad, but after months of working with the hologram she’d realized he was pretty damn close. He had all Brad’s annoying tendencies and (she had to admit) his pleasant ones as well. It might have been a little too on-the-nose to bring her flowers and attempt to sleep with her (not to mention difficult, unless holograms had corporeality she’d yet to discover), but Brad could be spontaneously courteous at the most surprising times, brewing her a pot of tea in the cooker, using manipulators to lay the correct number of bags into the water, with the tags always hanging neatly over the lip of the pot lip.
Brad also made sure the dishwasher kept her favorite mug clean. He kept her mattress warmed to the perfect temperature and, twice now, had left a small box of chocolates on her pillow in an insulated, temperature-controlled case. Those times had both perfectly coincided with the low point in Chloe’s cycle. Brad claimed he wasn’t “snooping around her vagina” as she accused him of, but said he could read her moods.
As with all escorts, specialist nanobots kept Chloe from menstruating — but that didn’t mean she was immune to the hormones. When they hit, she was girl enough to find solace in chocolate, and found the avatar’s thoughtfulness sweet.
But there was another reason Chloe kept Brad active most times, and it had nothing to do with his instruction or AI compassion: He was comfortable and familiar, despite being faux, in a world where too many things seemed to have been sent by a stranger.
Alone now, Chloe manipulated the web, searching for loose ends having to do with O’s background on Nicole Shaw. Her mom was obviously the starting point in finding her father. Brad’s usual disapproving chair was empty, but Chloe could feel his judgment anyway. She was scraping the very underbelly of the world the canvas allowed her to access, and if she’d been able to actually see or hear the porter, she probably wouldn’t have been able to go through with this.
And that she had to do.
She’d left Andrew’s apartment deeply satisfied but befuddled. She’d slept for an indeterminate time, then woke to find him still unconscious. His face had been so pleased. She’d risen without disturbing him, then left him a note. It had taken her fifteen minutes to write, despite its brevity. Every word had to be perfect. Today hadn’t been their first time together, but a box had been opened and her note had to strike the perfect tone.
She had to go.
She loved him.
She would talk to him soon.
But it was, most certainly, not a brush-off, any more than it was an expression of regret.
She cherished him.
And she had to go.
And she loved him.
The finished note had totaled 34 words, and even after those hard fifteen minutes, Chloe had agonized over leaving it — and then over leaving Andrew.
The air outside had seemed both rarer and more aromatic than usual when she’d exited his run-down apartment. She’d felt like a new woman — a strange woman, who didn’t truly understand herself. She’d felt like some girls said they did after losing their virginity. Supposedly, for some girls losing their virginity was like the dawning of a new age — as if the person below the surface had changed, or become something more.
Chloe felt like that. Now she was more. And at the same time, she was somehow less as well. Changed more than anything. Still the same, yet somehow diminished.
Was she an elite escort who’d discovered a new and unknown side of herself? Was she a girl who’d found a man she finally cared about in a way she hadn’t before? Or had she, conversely, lost something? Was Chloe’s new sense of vulnerability a negative? Would it make the doppelgänger sharing her skin unable to do its work? Had she blurred the lines between affection and sex, as her mother had warned her never to do? Or had she pried them further apart?
It wasn’t about Andrew, or sex. It wasn’t about love, her job, her age, her position, or the days of her life.
This was about Chloe.
She wasn’t confused because Andrew had enchanted her. She was confused because she was, at her core, confused.
Who was she? Who, really, was this girl she called “herself”?
She’s whatever the situation demands.
Who was Chloe?
And the answer came back, simple and disturbing: In the absence of instructions, a model, or a situation to join, Chloe had no idea who she was.
Who was Chloe Shaw?
She’s Chloe Shaw.
Instead of having a stark simplicity, that simple truth felt so complex. So daunting.
Chloe felt alone. She looked at the chair again, almost wanting Brad to be in it as an anchor, to give her comfort like a cherished teddy bear. But if he’d disapproved before when she’d searched below The Beam, below Crossbrace, and to the very data laying underneath the old Internet, he would disapprove even more now.
The porter — a creature of ones and zeroes — had seen Chloe’s investigation as a trespass. She wasn’t reading old news pages; she was peeking through windows. She wasn’t researching; she was spying. That old data, so closely held by residents of The Beam’s digital neighborhoods, was private in a way she’d never understand. It underlaid their culture — and Chloe, as a sack of flesh and bones, had no business dipping her meaty fingers into it.
And still, as she dug, heaping treasured data to the side like excavating a sacred grave, Chloe didn’t care. Let him judge her. She could feel his stare even in his disembodied state. Brad called her a trespasser, but Chloe didn’t feel like one. If she shouldn’t be here, why was it so easy to find those old neighborhoods? And why did she feel so at home in them — as if she were the prodigal daughter, finally returning to reclaim her heritage?
; But in the end there was, of course, nothing of Chloe in that data — nor of Nicole. Yet, despite Brad’s objections, the old AI greeted her as if Chloe Shaw were as much of a legacy to The Beam as to O.
What do you need to know, Chloe? the virtual world seemed to ask.
And she asked it: Who is my father?
The answer, offered in Beam and Crossbrace pages, but echoing in Chloe’s mind as if spoken aloud: Who are you?
Who am I? her mind repeated.
But no, even that is the wrong question. You should be asking, Who is your mother?
Chloe didn’t argue. The web split open like a walnut, revealing core O and Wellness Spa data about Nicole Shaw that Chloe was certain she wasn’t supposed to have access to. And she wouldn’t have had access, Chloe also knew, if she’d gone in through the front door.
But old AI didn’t always use the front door, and right now it was holding her hand.
She was presented with a virtual dossier on her mom, arranged in a way she didn’t consciously understand but nonetheless intuited without effort. The web had surrounded her, and she was seeing patterns in the data. Chloe was thinking like a machine, as if she herself had been born here — as if she were data herself. Right now, as she let her mind immerse, she didn’t even see the world around her as holograms. She saw it as if it were real, as if she were part of it — as if a place had been prepared long ago and was just waiting for her now.
And in that place, Chloe saw what the old AI showed her, about her mother:
Nicole, abused as a girl.
Nicole, under the knife at age 17.
Nicole, hired by Wellness, excelling at her job.
A man, who should have been visible to Chloe’s search erased instead. A shadow man. Known by the AI, she suspected, but deliberately hidden. A man who’d been with Nicole often enough to possibly be Chloe’s father, but with his identity obscured.
She saw echoes of the way Nicole had always handled the topic: revealing that there was a man, but not who he was. A half-secret, tantalizing in the partial reveal.
Yes, someone was there … but we won’t tell you who he was.
Why?
The flow of pages evaporated and Chloe saw the worst.
The knife.
Age 17.
Her mother’s years in the spa before Chloe’s birth, years of exposure that she’d learned caused intentional sterility. Nicole had not only had a hysterectomy, but was also left with no viable eggs.
And yet, as Chloe searched, she got a sense of herself. She was here, in the world today. She’d been born. There was footage. She’d grown inside her mother, then been born into a water bath at home. A primal memory of the transition was still visible to her deepest mind.
The shadow man, hidden from view.
The woman who never should have been able to birth a child.
Chloe lowered her Beam gloves, her quasi-trance popping. Brad appeared on his usual chair. Instead of disapproving, he looked almost sad.
Sad for her. Sad for Chloe.
“Go ahead. Ask.”
Chloe shook her head slowly side to side.
“Go ahead,” Brad repeated. “Ask the question that’s brightest in your mind. Ask what you truly need to know.”
Chloe took a breath. She focused her mind, imagining that old AI as a friend.
“Who is Chloe Shaw?” she asked.
And The Beam told her.
WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
The Future of Sex continues in The Mother Beforehand.
The Immaculate Conception Page 7