Upgraded

by Peter Watts

  Once she was ready to wipe her memory, she’d be useless to the corporate thugs. They’d leave Alexis alone after that. And the information—the memories—they wanted would be gone.

  Negative space: On the sidewalks of Hanoi, women burned household trash, bit by bit, in old coffee cans. There was a zoo near Lan’s home. At night the monkeys screeched in their cages. Vendors sold reused bottles of UV-sterilized lake water.

  Negative space: Lan’s father took her to Ha Long Bay on the weekends, to row with the fishermen between mist-shrouded islands. Water greener than jade. They floated through caverns on tidal currents, emerged in secret lagoons ringed by limestone and jungle.

  Behind her, the slap of bare feet on sidewalk. Lan turned. Her hands were shaking—nerves. She shoved them into her pockets. The guy was about her age, a year or two older at most. Seventeen. Shirtless, with dirt-crusted denim sucked to his hips and legs like it had been sprayed on. He glanced back the way he’d come, and she saw the circuitry fused to the base of his skull.

  Classic external-interface datahead. Post-plague augmentations. He’d probably spent all his cash on augs, and now couldn’t afford to buy connected space on a private shard. Stuck selling off assemblers that he didn’t have the skill to manipulate.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He shaded his eyes and squinted at her. Lan crouched down in the shade cast by the fountain’s low wall. She swung her backpack off her shoulder. The datahead sat, leaned his bare back against the concrete.

  “You still want them?” he asked. Mood beads, aglow like dying coals, followed the ink-black lines of a dragon tattoo on his arm. They flared a lecherous red when he looked her up and down. She shuffled backward and tried not to grimace. She couldn’t afford to be picky.

  Two weeks ago, north of San Diego, someone had jacked the drive systems of Alexis’ bus and ran it into the closest building. She’s scrambled away in time to see, from a vantage down the street, the thugs descend. A man and a woman, the same pair that had kicked down the door to their Seattle studio and trip-wired the apartment in Boise. Lan couldn’t put Alexis at risk any longer.

  She met the datahead’s eyes. “You’ve got two cartridges, right?”

  The LED glow on his arm faded. He scratched at his neck. “Yeah. Selling for one-fifty each.”

  Lan emptied her backpack onto the sidewalk. A water bottle clanged against the concrete. She picked up her modeling clay and stuffed it back inside, then snagged a roll of bills.

  “They’re virgin, right? I don’t want anything that’s already encoded. Too slow to reconfigure.”

  He glanced at the skin-fused graphene circuits—standard installations, nothing like the latticework hidden deeper in her brain—that curled over the back of her neck, up into her hair and around her ears. “Looks like you’ve got the gear to do whatever coding you want.”

  “And if I had nothing to do all day but sit on my thumbs and—”

  He wasn’t looking at her anymore. Something, or someone, over her shoulder held his interest. The cartridges lay in his loose-cupped hand, and he jiggled them absently like he was trying to keep her attention. The lines on his dragon went incandescent—panic—when Lan started to turn her head, and he snapped his gaze back to her eyes. Lan tensed. A trap. Time to go.

  Lan exploded into motion. She seized her pack straps, both in one hand, swiped the datahead’s cartridges with the other. Leapt to her feet and spun. The woman, the same one from Seattle, Boise, the bus accident, stood in the center of the street. Across the asphalt, a door opened. The man came at a jog.

  Lan shoved the cartridges into her pocket, slung her pack over a shoulder, and ran. Her legs were tired from trekking in from the suburbs. Still, sidewalk fell beneath her strides, the slap, slap, slap of tennis shoes on concrete. She heard the man’s heavy gait behind her, closing. Bicycles stopped, riders staring. Gamblers leaned out from the shade of their wagons to look.

  Her legs failed. Lan stumbled, recovered, tripped again and barely got a foot in front of her falling body. She glanced back and saw the man just yards behind, the woman on his tail. Lan’s thoughts plunged, desperate, into her integrated circuitry and her app-building studio. She snared code modules, stuffed in library functions, pulled images, sounds, vids from the public shard, constructed a slapdash memory of a footrace she’d never run. She loaded the program into her nanocore, gave the order to execute, and, in an instant, remembered the endorphin thrill of sprinting for the finish, seconds ahead of the pack.

  The wind blew harder on her face, her feet fell faster, and she heard her pursuers lag behind. But the burst fizzled. She couldn’t comprehend the weakness in her legs, not with the fast-forward high of the race so fresh in her memory. It’s my own creation, Lan remembered. For a moment, her memories stood in juxtaposition. She’d won a race. She’d never been on a track in her life. Then the false memory collapsed, falling under the weight of years of recollections that contradicted it.

  Lan stumbled and smacked the sidewalk. She hadn’t considered context. In order for a new memory to survive, it had to have stronger support than any contradicting information.

  Hands latched her upper arms, lifted her from the ground. She kicked and tossed her head. Her heels connected, produced a couple grunts, but the clamps on her arms tightened.

  The man spoke calmly in her ear, as if it took no effort to hold her. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  Lan craned her neck, intent on spitting at him. Her muscles cramped. The woman perched on the curb, waving the cyclists and passengers onward. A public shardcast came over Lan’s wireless, whispered in her circuitry. The spectators—absent integrated hardware, probably because they feared another plague—raised hands to cup their earbuds.

  “Police business. Please keep moving. Excuse the disturbance.”

  Traffic resumed. Those morons! Lan couldn’t believe it. Did they not understand why the sharding happened in the first place? Networks flayed open by sell-sword crypto-savants? Servers murdered, collateral damage in the Sino-Ascendant infowars? The most basic truism of the public shard, of the global internet’s last gasp, was that nothing was secure. The woman on the curb could impersonate the president if she wanted.

  “What’s your deal?” Lan asked.

  The man chuckled. “You mean, how do we get away with nabbing kids off the street? Don’t play dumb. It was just a matter of time before we caught you.”

  “Screw you,” Lan said. She kicked again.

  The woman got in Lan’s face. “Come off it, princess. We’ve got you on attempted shard infiltration. Fingered you last week when you were trying to insert a node into Hanoi’s private domain. Too bad you couldn’t just let daddy go, huh? Made you easy to follow.”

  “Bull,” Lan said. “Public’s got all the info I want. Private shards are glorified photo albums. I don’t care about what such and such family did on their vacation.”

  “Yes, I’m sure that the Vietnamese government fills their private cloud with baby pictures and tourist shots. And that the server logs are lying about your connection attempts.”

  “It’s—”

  “Go ahead. Keep making a scene. When the cops notice we’ll pass along our information on your hacking attempts. They’ll connect you to Ms. Langstrom—or whatever alias your Alexis uses now—and scoop her up, too.”

  Lan closed her mouth. The woman smiled.

  Negative space: Her father worked in a basement beneath downtown Hanoi, a warren of gray cubicle walls. Once, he took her deeper, down to the air-conditioned rooms where the LEDs on the stacks of machinery looked like lights in a city skyline. Her father’s coworkers always stepped aside to let him pass. One told her to be proud—her father was a savant.

  Negative space: A blond woman stood in the doorway. Lan’s aunt set the bent end of her ladle’s handle over the rim of the cauldron of phở and beckoned the woman inside. The stranger’s name was Alexis. She’d been working with Lan’s father on a data-scraping contract. A str
ange job, conducted in the jungle rather than beneath Hanoi. Something had gone wrong, and Alexis wanted to know if Lan could come with her.

  Negative space: She spent a week watching TV in Alexis’s hotel room. Her father hadn’t returned. Alexis said there were still people searching the jungle, and that he must still be alive because they hadn’t found anything. No dead body is what she meant, even though she didn’t say it. Alexis suggested that Lan might want to leave for a while. With her. To America. Just until her father could be found.

  Her captors left Lan alone in the room, sitting in an overstuffed chair. A wall of glass looked over the ruined city, across the desert to the sharp rise of red rock cliffs. An air conditioner hummed, probably using hundreds of dollars of kilowatts an hour.

  Lan kept her eyes from the suburb where she and Alexis had been hiding. Soon, Alexis would leave. She’d be safer without Lan. Wouldn’t have to run to keep Lan from the hands of the companies that wanted her abilities.

  Negative space: The cab driver wove through Hanoi’s afternoon traffic, veering into the oncoming lanes, shouldering bikes aside, scraping mirrors on exhaust-stained brickwork. Alexis spoke into a headset, arranging to have immigration paperwork delivered to her suite downtown. She argued. Clenched her jaw.

  Negative space: Lan and Alexis walked the length of the pier to their ship. A man at the end of a jetty sold braces of flapping pigeons to hungry dockworkers. Nearby, a girl—mid-teens, data-geared—reclined against a piling. Her lids fluttered over eyes that rolled left to right. Fingers scuttled over dirty silk pants. Her throat moved, subvocal mumblings. Virus-bait. Fallen to the data plague that had spread just after Lan’s father disappeared. The girl might stay alive if someone forced food and drink down her.

  Negative space: Alexis joined her at the railing. Vietnam disappeared beneath the curve of the horizon. Farther down the deck someone mentioned a news blitz on the Sino-Ascendant conflict. The Chinese were flooding the net with infobombs. Data had stopped flowing—a worldwide denial of service. Markets were plummeting. Alexis chewed her thumb and pulled Lan to the ship’s bow where the wind lifted their hair and played across their skin.

  Negative space: Alexis said she’d do what she could for Lan’s aunt, send money and literature for battered women. Lan just nodded, knowing her aunt would ignore the help, and turned her eyes back to the sea. They hadn’t spoken of Lan’s father in days because there was no need. He was gone. It was then that she decided to learn how to forget. To really forget.

  The man and woman stalked into the room, taking seats that partially blocked Lan’s view of the desert.

  She locked eyes with the woman. “So here we are. The end of the chase. I still won’t work for you.”

  “Your mom—Is that what you call her? Or is it just Alexis? Anyway, our company expended a lot of resources getting you out of Vietnam. She owes us a large debt.”

  Lan covered her surprise. She’d thought Alexis had used her own funds to bring Lan across the ocean. “You paid for my immigration. Big deal. You still don’t own my nanocore. I have a right to my childhood.”

  “Is that what you think?” the woman said. “That Alexis keeps you running so that you can have a normal childhood?” The woman rolled her eyes. “How many other kids spend their lives hiding in abandoned apartments? You’re smart enough to know that’s a lie.”

  Lan folded her arms over her chest. She imagined a lump of clay in her hand, twisting it, breaking it. The visualization kept her calm.

  “Did Alexis tell you what we wanted you to do?” the woman asked.

  “I’m my father’s daughter. You probably think that he taught me things that your captive geniuses can’t figure out. Except I was six years old and just a year into primary school.” Lan shook her head. “You people are crazy.”

  “It’s not just what he taught you. It’s your genetics. We’re sure that you’ve got the ability to lay down the protocols that could bring the shards back into a single, secure network. Safe from data plagues.”

  Lan liked to think that her father had died fighting the plague. But sometimes, she worried that it was the other way around, that her father had released the first virtual microbes and then disappeared, running from his guilt. Sometimes that worry stuffed her chest and it got hard to breathe. Then she fled to the corners of her mind and practiced her source code manipulations, practiced forgetting.

  “I’d rather beg on the street corner than build another plague breeding ground.”

  The woman draped one leg over the other. “But that’s the thing—even if you don’t help, another global network is inevitable. People are starting to forget the reason for the sharding. The US government just shut down a messenger app that linked with the pub shard. Think of all those kids that ran out and got augmented after the sharding made us feel safe. Think of the families trying to rebuild the savings they lost in the infowar crash. Humanity needs an unbreakable security solution.”

  And the company who provided the solution would have a monopoly. Lan shrugged. “It’s not my problem.”

  “We have documentation proving that Alexis defaulted on her debt. Given the details of our arrangement, we can assure that she’ll spend time in prison.”

  “And if you lock her up, you lose all your leverage. I’ll have zero motivation to help you.”

  The woman’s mouth made a hard line. Lan reached into her pocket and palmed the assembler cartridges she’d swiped from the datahead. Pretending to scratch an itch at her hairline, she snapped them home. At a quick mental command, the assemblers fled the container and filled the reservoir beneath her skull. There, they received their assembly instructions, then tunneled beneath her brain casing, deep into gray matter.

  Lan began to code. She concentrated, working out contingencies and conditionals to account for her new circumstances. Soon, she’d forget everything about her father. She’d be useless to these people.

  “We’re an upstanding corporation. We’d rather not deviate from the legal guidelines of the countries in which we work. But . . . ”

  “But Alexis doesn’t have to be arrested to disappear. Just like my daddy, right?”

  The woman uncrossed her legs and set her hands on her knees. She leaned forward. The man stood and traversed the floor, stopping next to Lan’s chair. He placed a hand on the upholstery near her shoulder, showed a set of rings that could do a lot of damage in a punch.

  The woman spoke. “Imagine what you will about Alexis. As for your dad, I do have some interesting information. Unfortunately the documents are on a private shard. There’s no connected node here and no DNA scanner that I could use to authenticate.”

  Lan sighed. “Nice try. All I have to do to see those documents is heal the Internet, right?”

  The man removed his hand and stalked to the window. “Let’s just pull the mom in, Sherri. We’re not getting anywhere.”

  Lan’s heart stuttered. She needed to work faster. She started shoving pre-canned subroutines into her apps. A few more minutes, and she’d be ready to execute.

  The woman nodded. “There’s a pharma kit in the bedroom. We ought to be able to pull Alexis’ next destination if we get her semi-conscious and run through the scene library. Her brain will light up for images that share context with their travel plans. Whether she wants it to or not.”

  Context. Lan’s confidence plummeted. Context. Just like the footrace memory. She could replace the Vietnamese recollections, but she’d never get rid of the other hints that pointed back to her beginning. It would take days, weeks, maybe a lifetime, of planning to remove enough dependencies that the new memories would stick. And anyway, these people weren’t just after her memories of her father—they wanted her capabilities.

  Wipe it. Reset. Memzero.

  Restarting at nothing, it would take years for her to learn enough to even begin to manipulate software.

  It took less than a second to compose the app, and she paused, thoughts poised over the command to execute.

&n
bsp; The end of her identity. No more Vietnam, no more worry about Alexis, no more running. But no more memories of birthday parties either, no more late-night dancing to weird music, laughing at Alexis’s clumsy attempts. What if Lan didn’t have to lose herself forever?

  She accessed the public shard and started pulling up the wikis she might use to breadcrumb the way back to herself. Lan worked fast, overclocking the process she used to pull the data, maxing her bandwidth.

  “Get the pharma,” the woman said.

  Lan’s throat clamped down. Just a few minutes left—Lan could never flag enough sites to describe herself.

  It was time to let the negative space go. She’d planned it all along, but now that the moment had come, there didn’t seem nearly enough time to say goodbye.

  She’d lose the weekends spent rowing with her father in Ha Long Bay but keep the lasagna that Alexis always burned. So long to the taste of her aunt’s phở. On summer weekends, Alexis used to push Lan on the swing for hours. That would stay.

  Alexis. Always on the run, always protecting the child she’d first met as a six-year-old stranger. Lan could never repay the debt of gratitude. She realized, then, that the best way to thank her was to free her. Lan needed to make sure she could never find Alexis again.

  She wiped the wiki changes and started again.

  The trail began in Hanoi. Lan pinned a map reference, a satellite shot of her first home. She linked a photo of a woman burning trash on her apartment stoop. Piece by piece, Lan wove together references to her Vietnamese youth. Occasionally, she left memory dumps disguised as image or audio files, real mappings that could be loaded directly. Other times, the wiki article would have to be enough to rebuild a sense of self. When she was finished, she tacked a single command onto her reset app, one that would etch the first URL in the forefront of her mind with a stern directive to wait until she was free from captivity to open it.