by Various
“So how is it, coming back from the dead?”
Mom’s question, her teeth a flash of white behind her wine glass. Dad watches me over the yellow rim of his taco.
“Waking up in that tub was like in the movie Star Shiver, when the main guy is defrosted.”
Mom laughs. Dad nods vigorously, biting down on his food. Inwardly, I thank Traci’s thorough research.
Dinner ends. Sweat drips down my face like the hot splash of rain. When I finally retire to Peter Bayne’s bedroom of mock redwood, I feel ill, right down to my atoms. There’s a pilot chair in the room’s corner, and I know Traci is waiting for me to make contact through its virtual chat rooms. A holographic pair of samurai swords hangs on the wall. Guess Dad doesn’t let me have the real thing. Couldn’t make things too easy.
I seat myself in the pilot chair, slip my fingers into the virtuboard gloves, and instantly a pinwheel of color opens in my mind as my nanonics makes the uplink to the local web. Peter doesn’t have many friends; his online explorations are sharply limited in a global web that is crawling back from post-war shambles.
I find Traci at once, in one of Peter’s few virtual hangouts—a place called SteamGuild. It looks like a submarine pen, gloomy and damp, with colossal chains and industrial wheels cranking mad configurations of gears across the wall. It takes me a minute to realize that the gears themselves are arranged into a mockery of famous ancient artwork. The Last Supper. Starry Starry Night. The Scream. Young people mill about in steampunk clichés. Water drips from a rusted ceiling and tinkles into brackish pools.
Traci is waiting for me, wearing a neogoth avatar with fiery vermillion hair like blood against her black corset. Huge eyes reminiscent of Old Calendar Japanese animation.
“Peter!” she says, visibly relieved. “Welcome back from your accident!” She hesitated. “Your Dad must be happy to see you.”
“Actually, both Mom and Dad had the exact same identical reaction! It was surprising!”
I can see Traci gets my meaning. She looks as if she’s been tasered, and makes several stammering attempts at speech without blowing both our covers.
Was my father monitoring this communication? The deputy mayor of New Haven would have access to spybots, and in his former life, Peznowski had been openly addicted to control. Liked to know what was happening. Hated being taken off-guard.
Traci is still trying to get her bearings. “Are you… will you still be able…”
I cut in hastily, “I haven’t told him just how serious you and I are getting. I think I’ll bring it up tomorrow. I did have a couple of questions for you, though.”
“What questions, Pete?”
“If I tell Mom and Dad, do you think that will be enough? Are there other relatives of mine who should be told also?”
She shakes her head, hair batting the sides of her face. “We would’ve… I mean, Mom and Dad should be enough.”
“You sure?”
Traci freezes. Her face loses all composure, as if the nerve endings behind her skin have been cut. Somewhere in Traci’s lab, a hasty conference is being held with all the people creating this youthful apparition.
How many Peznowskis exist? How crafty is my old enemy? The nightmarish image slithers into my skull of the entire town of New Haven possessed by Peznowski clones.
Then Traci blinks, her invisible puppeteers slipping back into the role. “Just tell your parents. Both of them. I’m sure you’ll find a way.”
“And afterwards?”
Traci’s avatar makes a strange motion with her hand. She rubs her fingers across her palm. I recognize it from my earliest undercover training, back when I was assigned to infiltrate the Partisans.
Erase yourself.
Somewhere in my new head, Traci must have planted a kill switch. Always handy when behind enemy lines. I haven’t had the chance to thoroughly review my subfile, but I do a quick search now and find the kill switch icon: a tiny grim reaper.
Too bad Clint Frederick Jamison’s wife didn’t have one implanted.
I thank Traci and log out. Peter’s bedroom returns, and I swivel on the pilot chair, wondering what to do.
There’s a brush of movement at my bedroom door. Suzie enters, tail wagging. Poor girl must have missed Peter.
I scratch behind her ears, considering the problem before me. Across forty-one years, Shane’s voice enters my thoughts: The Partisans were famous for being able to sniff out a mole.
I know I’m on borrowed time.
• • •
The next morning Dad is gone by the time I get to the kitchen for breakfast. Mom’s at the counter, wielding two knives as if they are her hands, dexterously pinning a raw venison roast and slicing it up.
“Good morning!” Mom coos. “Breakfast is on the table!”
I regard my breakfast plate of polenta and minced seaflower, glass of cranberry juice, and a sprig of mint.
“Did you sleep well?”
I nod, helping myself to the juice. When Peznowski dies, he’ll eventually be regenerated at the same center where he picked me up. What was Traci’s plan for that? Had her hack team placed other operatives, insidiously tucked away inside hijacked bodies? Were they even now combing through save files, locating and deleting the encoded remnants of the Partisans?
Mom rubs her blades together. She lifts the diced meat into a pan.
I finish the juice, grab some polenta and approach Mom/Peznowski from behind while she splashes tenderizer over the meat. I’ll make it clean and quick, and handle Dad when he comes home. Reflexively, I glance out the. There, pacing amid the rows of adobe homes, was a lone man, e-cig dangling from his mouth.
It’s Dad.
Perplexed, I go to the window and press against the cool glass. Dad is a block away, the gloomy apartment buildings hover like gothic towers above him. He’s talking into his wrist, though by his animated movements I’m guessing he’s in full virtual conference.
“Dad didn’t go to work today?” I ask, turning to Mom.
She’s rinsing her knives. The kitchen looks strangely fuzzy, grey at the corners of my vision.
“He did, dear.”
“But…” I feel my head fogging, suddenly aware of the empty cranberry glass with ghastly implication. Panic novas in my chest, galvanizing a last desperate action. My fingers are tingling, legs turning rubbery. I leap at Mom.
She turns me aside with ease, twisting my attack away and slamming my head into the oven. White sparks explode in my vision. I try to get to my feet but Mom is already backing out of reach. The strength leeches out from my limbs. Ceiling spins once around, like water in a drain, and before all goes black, I see Peznowski’s cruel eyes glinting out from that imposter face.
How did they… know…?
• • •
When I regain consciousness, my optic readout shows me that sixteen minutes have passed. I can’t move my arms or legs. Vision clears, but my head feels as if someone has put a drill behind my ear. I’m on my parent’s bed, limbs strapped to all four bedposts. The pillow is wet behind me.
Mom is holding bloody knives and smiling.
“Mom?”
“Cut the charade,” Dad says from the corner. He flicks something at me and it lands like an earring on my chest.
My kill switch. He must have dug it out of my head while I was drugged.
“Who are you?” Dad says. He sits down like a gargoyle beside me, hunching and eager, the old jackal expression on his face. “I already know you’re not our son. We grafted a rotating verbal tic into his consciousness when he was young, triggered whenever he steps into the kitchen. He’s not even aware of it. Subtle, comes across as mild OCD.” When I don’t answer, Dad’s nostrils flare. “You’ve got a damned name. What is it?”
“Maximilian.”
Dad turns to Mom. “Take out his eyes.”
She springs into action so fast it’s as if she’s been waiting her whole life for this. Mom kneels beside my head, still wearing the checkered apron f
rom breakfast.
“What is it with you and eyes, Peznowksi?” I shout.
“Wait,” Dad says. He’s almost too late. Mom has already positioned the tips of both blades a half inch from the corners of my left eye. A horrific stainless steel V in my vision.
In my right eye, Dad’s hybrid face appears. He’s flush and excited, eyes like pale lanterns behind his glasses.
No kill switch, no kill switch, no kill switch.
Dad looks ape-like, cheeks swollen, eyes sharp. “Do you know me?”
“I’m Harris Alexander Pope.”
My parents let out an astonished gasp in the same instant. Their heads rotate to regard each other, slack-jawed and gratified.
“Harris?!” Dad sits back, laughing heartily. He stands up and does a fist-pump in the air. “Oh! The universe loves me!”
Mom leaps upon me, knocking the wind from my lungs. Her laughter is shrill and hideous as she gouges both my eyes out.
• • •
“Harris? Look at me.”
Dad’s voice, followed by wicked female laughter.
I turn my head in the direction of the voice, trying not to think of my mutilated face. My throat is ragged from screaming.
“You know,” Dad intones in my ear, “I would never have known you were the traitor. I died up there… no memory of what happened. We always planned on regrouping in New Haven if things went wrong and at first, I wondered why you didn’t regen with us. I spent hours combing through the files for your save. Then I saw all the magazines and news clips. Harris Pope, war hero, went undercover with the Partisans and popped our headquarters like a bad blister. Who sent you here?”
“The ghost of Christmas Past.”
There’s a terrible silence. The pain in my eyesockets fans into my skull. Fear is an incredible emotion. We are nothing more than ragged pulses of fear, tossed out of wombs and onto a great frying pan. Even with technological miracles delivered through syringe or ingestible, we are still the primeval beast howling for all time.
“What was the plan?” Peznowski asks. Can’t tell if it’s Mom or Dad. Husky voice, almost a whisper. “You kill us, and then… what?”
“They didn’t tell me. Honest.”
“They?”
“Christmas Past, Present, and—”
It must be his fist that smashes through my teeth. The attack stuns me into mute stupidity, the broken teeth in my mouth like peanut shells. I spit them out in a gob of bloody saliva.
“I’m going to torture you forever, you know.” Mom’s voice in my ear. “But not like this. Matthew and I have been talking about how Peter grew up too fast. We want a little baby again. How would like your consciousness downloaded into a helpless creature, engineered to never grow up. Your mind trapped in that prison for all time, slowly turning to mush, while we feed you, and wrap you up and change your diapers… year, after year, after year? Forever?”
A new scream starts in my throat, shredding my resolve.
I stutter through broken teeth and blood. “Earth will eventually step in.”
“No they won’t,” Dad says. “We made a mistake in our earlier dealings with Earth. Strict isolationism doesn’t work. The birth world needs to be brought to heel. With their environmental problems, economic problems, political problems… all it will take is one big disaster to reduce them.”
“Earth will show up sooner or later and erase every last Partisan file!” I hear desperation in my own voice.
“A dozen captured asteroids too small for detection,” Dad says. “Hurtling toward Mother Blue. You think Mars was hit hard? Earth will be thrown back to the Stone Age, and we’ll make sure they stay there.”
The terrible majesty of what he is saying is underscored by its plausibility. Even at the time of the Partisan war, Earth had been collapsing under the weight of environmental and economic pressures. If the Partisans struck Earth in the way he proposed, civilization really would come apart at the seams.
And meanwhile, I’d be screaming wordless for all time, cradled in my sadistic mother’s arms…
“You Partisans always have a contingency plan,” I say numbly.
“Yes,” Mom and Dad say together. “We do.”
I open my sightless sockets. Black room, swirling in an oily eddy. Through the squirting fluids and ruptured flesh, my optic nerves are firing in dazzling pixilated bursts of color, a swansong for the world of light. The nerves are still reaching for information to process, phantom images like black plates of glass, all the same color, shifting over each other.
I clear my throat. “So do I.”
In my head, buried where Mom’s knives couldn’t get to, the dom patch is running. Since injecting my subject last night with the neuro-remote hidden in my fingers, it has never stopped running. Doesn’t work on humans, but it turns lower life-forms into remote-controlled toys.
The dom patch menu tells me that these last few minutes of conversation have been successfully recorded by our ever-so-quiet listener in the doorway. I scroll down to the next option.
ATTACK PARAMETERS: ALL.
• • •
I’m naked in a steel tub, and Traci is helping me sit up. Shane is nowhere to be seen, and my mouth still thinks I’m in mid-speech at the save center. Behind Traci, I see Charlotte’s lovely face, but it’s strangely aged now. A towel is in her hands.
I snatch it from her and cover my nakedness. “Do you mind?” The surroundings settle into my thoughts. A regeneration pod, where they grow new bodies for mental downloads.
Which means that I’ve died. And I don’t even remember opening my eyes.
Traci laughs, her shock of chestnut curls dancing with the movement. “Sorry, hero. What’s the last thing you remember?”
Towel floating over my groin atop the slimy water, I look back and forth between their faces. A wave of irritation flickers in me. “It was three days after I returned from Phobos. I was talking to Shane. He said there were seven seconds left for the file uploading.”
Traci’s smile straightens out, and she looks at me with strange respect and sympathy. “There’s a lot to talk about, Harris.” She steps back, taking Charlotte’s arm. “Get yourself toweled off and meet us in my office, third door down from the showers.”
Their celebratory joy is visible, and I get the impression of being the birthday boy about to be led into a surprise party. I glance at the regeneration pod again, my anger subsiding. “Is this Bradbury Station?”
“New Haven.”
“My contract states—”
“See me in my office,” Traci interrupts, and she walks away with Charlotte.
I finally notice a wall-console within reach, and I slap its screen.
The first stunner is today’s date on the ticker at the bottom of the screen: May 20, 2316! Forty-two years separating the blink of an eye and flash of a neuron! Then I see two recent news articles posted by Traci for my viewing. The first headline rocks my core. NEW HAVEN PARTISAN REMNANT ERASED, “GRISLY” PLANS MADE PUBLIC.
The Partisans? Hadn’t we defeated them four decades ago?
I stand up, dripping synth-gel, and tuck the towel around my waist. Forget the shower. Traci needs to explain a few things, and I think I’ll start by prodding her about that second, weirder and older headline: FAMILY DOG KILLS DEPUTY MAYOR, WIFE, SON.
THE NIGHTMARE LIGHTS OF MARS
by Brian Trent
First published in Escape Pod (Sep. 2013), edited by Norm Sherman
• • • •
BEFORE DISCOVERING the moths, Clarissa Lang stumbled blind in the Martian sandstorm and admitted she was about to die because of a painting.
Granules of sand flew past her head at 90 kph and crunched between her teeth. The storm hissed around her ears, a terrible insistence that she hush forever. There was no excuse for this death, Clarissa thought. Weather advisories had been in place for an hour. Her death would become a digital footnote, filed under foolishness, for all time.
She staggered blind and ta
cked through the needle-spray. Red sand piled around her neck and shoulders, grew around her mouth like exaggerated lipstick.
“Overlay!” she shouted—tried to shout—but her mouth instantly filled with gritty particulate. She panicked then, the first moment of true mindless panic. But the Martian Positioning Satellite had heard her cry: Maureen’s property map sprang up in her left eye, drawn scarlet against each blink.
The house was thirty meters northwest. Upwind.
Clarissa tucked herself into a protective ball and scuttled sideways, like a crab. The sand struck her exposed hands and face in a shifting, relentless wave.
I’ll never make it.
Clarissa could no longer breathe. A recent story from the Japanese colony in Cydonia leapt to her mind, in which a grandmother had been caught outside in a sandstorm, wandered around in circles for ten minutes in the hissing tempest, and finally suffocated an arm’s length from her front door. When they found her, her stomach, throat, and mouth were bulging with sand.
The toolshed! I can make the toolshed!
Clarissa turned away from her house and the full brunt of the sandstorm slammed into her back, tearing the jacket, spraying around her body in silhouette. For a fleeting instant, she was able to suck clean air into her lungs. Then the sand closed around her again.
She ran downwind, following the MPS overlay, and tripped over a tree-stump—all that remained of the maple her wife had heat-lanced a week ago. Clarissa fell and rolled, her face briefly showered in needle-spray, and then she was on her feet again, running, weeping, not looking back.
In three bounds she was at the shed. She grabbed the door handle and pulled.
It was locked. The shed was slotted to Maureen’s biometrics. Clarissa pounded the door furiously.
There was only one chance left. She felt along the shed walls and reached the back as a muddy, bloody figure. With the last reserves of wild strength, she battered herself against the window. The glasstic was shatter-proof, but it popped from its molding and she fell atop its reflective surface, safe and shivering in the shed.