Kalifornia

by Marc Laidlaw

  Door chimes warbled and bleeped in the distance. He didn’t move. Let the ilk answer it.

  Hollywood again. Back into the ‘Woods. How could he have been so stupid? The networks were closed off to him. He should have known! No one cared about a has-been, a refugee from a family show. The Figueroas were stale news, deep in the trough of that peculiar fifteen-year sine-wave between popularity and nostalgia. He might be dead by the time a full-fledged rerun cult began. Poppy lay in a coma. His wife was long dead, and his mistress freshly so. His oldest son had vanished without a word, as mysteriously as his granddaughter had. It was strange how numb he felt, as if pain and shock were gathering in a reservoir inside him, stored up for some future time when he was ready to drink of them. He’d suggested a series—“Orphan Dad.” “Love the idea, Alf, it’s just great, but without the whole family we don’t have a chance of competing against the Magyks.” Who were skyrocketing to unguessed-of heights even as he puffed and chewed the soya filter ragged. “Find yourself a new wife—get an interracial thing going, that would be best—adopt yourself some kids, then maybe we’ll talk. But it’ll have to be your money till then.”

  Meanwhile, out of pity, they offered him a pawnship on “Hollywood Chess.”

  Take that town by storm.

  A far-off clatter on the ceramic tiles. Miranda started screaming.

  He peered down the hall. His daughter backed into the living room followed by something like a robot, but baroque and crystal-gleaming rather than functional matte black. Miranda turned and ran, shrieking, her huge breasts heaving on her dinky frame, overcome by this terrific spectacle. Even Alfredo doubted his senses until he saw the small human head of the robot, and its orange eyes.

  Miranda leaped over a sofa and crouched behind it. The robot filled the doorway, keeping eye contact.

  “Grandpa?” it said.

  His mouth moved uselessly. He knew who this was—had to be—wearing a robot like a pair of pajamas, talking like an adult. He didn’t have the words to greet her.

  “Cal—Calafia?”

  “Kalifornia,” she said, coming down hard on the name though she sounded relieved at the same time. A smile flashed over her little face, spontaneous, lighting up her features. “I left my escort outside, is that okay?”

  “Escort?” asked Alfredo, still numb.

  “They’ll behave. At least while I’m holding them.”

  “Escort from where?”

  “Originally? I didn’t ask. But they knew you.”

  He started across the room, beckoning toward the sofa. “Say hello to your niece, Miranda.”

  “You scared the shit out of me,” Miranda said, coming out of hiding. “Hey, where’d you get that outfit? It’s tortious. Sort of an Iron Toddler look.”

  Alfredo put out his arms and embraced the hard carapace of his granddaughter, though he knew she couldn’t feel him. Her cheek was soft, her eyes were alive. She returned the embrace gently, careful of her four powerful arms. “Where’s my mommy? Uncle said she was hurt.”

  “Your uncle? Do you mean Sandy? Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. He got left behind. I want to see my mommy.”

  “Yes, of course, right away. She’s here; she’s below. Come, come, Calafia.”

  “Kalifornia,” she repeated. “My name is Kalifornia. But since we’re related, you can call me Kali.”

  ***

  Elevator doors parted, revealing a quiet room sealed behind glass. A man in a white uniform sat outside, watching a board of monitors. Kali walked past him, leaned her head against the glass, and looked in at the figure hanging in the harness.

  Mommy, she thought.

  She remembered what her uncle Sandy had said: Her mommy was a normal person, not a goddess. How could a goddess have a mortal mommy? A wounded mommy?

  Her fingertips clicked on the heavy pane; it wasn’t glass exactly, but some material similar to that from which her armor was made. Some part of her got busy analyzing it reflexively, for no reason. She shut off the babble. Not everything was important, she was learning. Information overwhelmed her from every direction, within and without. It wasn’t all of equal value, but there was no algorithm for deciding what mattered.

  She thought this did, though. Her mommy . . .

  “You can go in,” her grandfather said. “I’ll be right here.”

  She went through the lock, into the clean-room, and stood over the woman in the wires.

  She didn’t even know her mommy’s name. Seeing her mommy so quiet, still as a doll, made her very curious to know more. Mommy had wires inside her, that much Kali sensed. Everybody around here seemed to have wires—not like the Daughters. That was good; it meant that she could get into them. She could be in everyone all the time.

  Back in the temple, Kali hadn’t realized how much power was in her reach. Some sort of electrical barrier in the temple walls had cut her off from the cosmos of information that swarmed all over the rest of the globe. No wonder she had felt so tiny and helpless back there; they had deliberately held her down, convincing her she was no more than a baby. Now she knew she really was a goddess. If she reached out with her mind, every sort of knowledge was hers.

  Now, for instance, when she wished to know more about her mommy, all she had to do was wonder—

  And knowledge came rushing in.

  Poppy Figueroa was her name.

  Kali was inside her, in a dingy room, giving way to spasms of belly pain, watching a spill of wires and blood, the birth of a tiny girl with orange eyes.

  Herself.

  Strange. The replay triggered memories; they floated up from Kali’s mind. She had seen all this once before. Yes, she had been there, in her mommy and in herself, watching herself being born as she felt herself coming out into air and light; looking up at Poppy as Poppy looked down at her, enduring a moment’s pain of feedback before her mommy, protectively, looked away.

  In that moment, they had been one entity. One mind. One life looking at itself through two sets of eyes. Her mommy’s eyes were orange.

  She decided to see if she could open them.

  Orange eyes, under white lids.

  She tried to put herself behind those lids. In a luminous silence. Floating, lost, going nowhere. No sensation. She had been there once before; she had been her mommy. No barriers existed now; no one could disconnect them. All she had to do was reach out and—

  Lift, she told the lids.

  The lids received mixed signals from Poppy’s brain. They weren’t sure what to do. Kali concentrated on making them pay attention to her alone.

  Lift!

  Her mommy’s eyelids fluttered. Parted. Sprang wide open.

  Orange eyes.

  She saw her mommy and herself. She was here in the clean-room but also cramp-legged on a dirty hotel bed; past and present merged in the network of polynerves.

  Outside the room, Kali heard the monitor bleeping. The man in white was shouting. Alfredo rushed to the glass.

  “What’s happening?” he said. “Did you see that? Did you see?”

  Kali took a step backward, maintaining the link. She worked her mommy’s fingers, elbows, arms; flexed them in the cat’s cradle. She turned the head from side to side and made the eyes blink normally.

  Mommy’s vision, from Kali’s POV, was cloudy, the view eroded by ragged areas, spots of gray, signs of neurological damage.

  “She’s healing her,” Alfredo said in awe.

  Mommy, Kali thought. Sadness overcame her. She had come from this womb. What’s wrong with you, mommy? Why won’t you come to me?

  Poppy’s body thrashed in the cradle, gently at first but with increasing agitation. Poppy’s arms went out longingly toward Kali. Animal noises spilled from her throat. She struggled to regain her feet, but the cradle and sheer muscle loss, after so much time in the harness, held her back.

  Kali didn’t want to be hugged by a puppet, but she couldn’t bear to be separated from Poppy’s flesh now that she was inside it. Poppy
fought free of the harness, tottering on the floor, reaching out for her armor-plated daughter. At last, an embrace. Kali lost track of whose head she was in. Part of her spilled out of control, buoyed by excitement and despair, and she found herself watching this scene through her grandfather Alfredo’s eyes, touching briefly on the doctor’s perceptions, too. She didn’t want to be in them—it diffused her sense of reality—but she couldn’t quite control it. Her mind felt cobbled together out of many different people. The sensation only added to her loneliness.

  How could she, a goddess, feel like an orphaned child?

  Suddenly the doctor pushed her aside, rushing to examine Poppy. Kali backed out of the chamber, but at the same time she stayed there, living through the doctor’s hands, feeling them take hold of her mommy’s arms.

  Alfredo hugged Kali’s crystal torso, kissed her cheeks of flesh.

  “You healed her,” he said, with joyous tears streaming down his cheeks. “You healed her! You are a marvel! This is the best day of my life. The day you came home to us. Oh, Calafia—Kali, I’m sorry. Of course you can change your name, if that’s the one you like.”

  Poppy nodded as the doctor worked her back into the harness.

  “She’ll soon be her old self, won’t she?” asked Alfredo, sounding sure of it. “We’ll all be reunited. We’ll all . . . what is it, Kali? Where are you going?”

  “I don’t feel well,” she answered, heading toward the elevator. The doctor’s flesh and her grandfather’s hung heavy on her. Outside the house, the soldiers in her escort were beginning to fidget. She felt herself coming apart, into too many fragments. She needed to consolidate somehow. “Is there somewhere I can rest?”

  “Oh, of course. You’re still just a baby, aren’t you? You need your rest. A nice nap. You can use a guest room while we fix up something special for you. I’m so glad you’ve come, Kali. Wait until I tell—oh, tell the world!”

  The world, she thought.

  It sounded so small.

  ***

  While the “world” clamored to see her, Kali spent her first days at home in seclusion, reliving endless replays of “Poppy on the Run.” She wanted to know her mommy as she’d been when she lived. If she got Poppy’s body to reenact enough of its old behavior tropes, it might eventually reactivate the nascent will that hid there somewhere, sleeping in damaged tissue. Or so she hoped.

  She played the kidnapping tape over and over again so often that giving birth to herself began to seem a commonplace occurrence. She gave birth to herself repeatedly. She leaned into the wires, inhabiting her mommy’s body, feeling the corroded iron of the fire escape beneath her fingers, hearing the voices of the dogs, watching the little parcel of blanketed flesh as it fell into the station wagon stalled conveniently below. Back and forth, back and forth a hundred times she fell; a thousand; more.

  Meanwhile, Poppy’s body was in therapy. Kali couldn’t bring herself to admit that she alone inhabited the form. Everyone believed it was Poppy herself, returning from the dead. Muscle rebuilt slowly. New joints slid smoothly beneath a webwork of fine scars. Poppy’s face fell into accustomed expressions, though they were not always suited to the situation: Kali could use only what she had gleaned from the wire show.

  “You’ll never get me!” she would cry out of context. The therapists thought she was talking to them, but they smiled and continued to hurt her in various ways essential to her recovery.

  Meanwhile, the crowd around the house grew steadily. Cars dipped through the canyon for a glimpse of Kali. Tourists crowded the balconies of restaurants on the opposite brink, overstressing the structures until, early one Sunday, a flock of gawking tourists—along with a handful of innocent brunchers—were precipitated into the abyss. Whereupon a mob of the deceased’s relatives converged on the Figueroa manor, begging Kali to bring them back from the dead as she had done her mother. Kali’s military escort were put to work holding back the agitated fans. The soldiers paraded the grounds of the house, patrolled the rooftops, even watched the doors and took up posts in the interior of the house. Kali watched through all of them; they served as her private closed-circuit remotes.

  She was watching in this manner one afternoon when Alfredo approached the apparent captain of the guard with an unsettling question.

  “Excuse me,” said her grandfather. “How are you and your men holding out? Like troopers, eh? You’re doing a fine job, I mean to say. But I have a question I wonder if you can answer.”

  Kali watched him through the soldier’s eyes, playing peekaboo. She was half tempted to make the captain wink at him, or coyly whisper, “It’s me, grandpa.”

  “How did you find Kali?” he asked. “Who hired you?”

  It was a good question. Kali didn’t know the answer herself. The soldiers, being so much in her power, never spoke of personal things—or anything at all. Any conversations they had were simply Kali talking quietly to herself, to create a semblance of normal behavior. This seemed important somehow, at least until she revealed the extent of her power.

  Still, her grandfather needed an answer.

  “Kali called us,” she said the captain. “She signaled through our wires, showed us the way through the Holy City, and we rescued her.”

  Kali had told her grandpa a little about the temple, but not much. He nodded slowly, unsure if this made any sense, then strolled away.

  The answer was good enough for him, but not for Kali.

  Where had they come from? She supposed she could try relaxing her hold on a few of the soldiers and see if they started talking among themselves; but she was afraid they might do something unpredictable if she let go for even an instant.

  One of the dog soldiers crossed the captain’s line of sight. The fierce, loyal dogmen had followed the human soldiers faithfully from the Holy City, despite the fact that none of them was wired or controlled by Kali.

  Her captain whistled to the dog. “Here, boy!”

  The soldier quickstepped over. “Sir!”

  “Is it true that you dogs have poor long-term memory?”

  The dog looked mildly offended. “Sir?”

  “I’m curious. Do you recall things only by their smell, or do you actually think about and remember things that aren’t explicitly present?”

  The dog was now plainly insulted. “I am more than eighty percent human, sir, and proud of my heritage. My exceptional sense of smell is enhanced by an exceptional memory. Nor is it true, as some humans seem to think, that I am color blind. I can appreciate a Motherwell or a Peter Max with the best of them.”

  “Hm. Then I suppose, just as a test, you’d have no trouble telling me who ordered us into the Holy City? Who sent us to find that young goddess?”

  “I recall the circumstances clearly, sir, but I can hardly give you the name of the one who hired us. The orders were encoded through Snozay Central. Is this a trick question?”

  “Snozay Central,” Kali’s captain murmured.

  “May I go now, sir?”

  “Yes. Good boy.”

  The dog walked off with a sneaking backward look. Snozay Central was merely a dispatch office, sending trained soldiers to assist in private, small-scale disputes. Ideally the guards were on hand to prevent violence; but they were also licensed to use violence on behalf of their employers, provided they did not stray beyond certain broadly defined parameters.

  Kali shunted her attention directly to the central dispatch office, of which the mercenaries and thousands of other soldiers were simple extensions, remote fighting-sensing units. Within a matter of moments, by ransacking records, she traced her escort’s original orders to their apparent source. It was easy but tedious, methodical work. The order calling them to the Holy City had been placed by a command center at a higher level, of which the various mercenary centers were only branches.

  She paused at this juncture, peering back through the wired flow of information as though examining a trail of crumbs. She could see, extending backward from her, a myriad of astral w
ires, each ending in a bulbous, human-shaped cul-de-sac: a human life—in this case a soldier. Mercenaries like these worked all over the nation, guarding banks and chemicals; some were at weapons practice, others eating lunch, while night watchmen slept away the day. She could enter any one of them right now, from where she hovered.

  But looking forward, she saw that this main line was but a thin branch stemming out of a much thicker limb. She rushed ahead on the data boughs, climbing closer to the trunk of the tree, and as it advanced her consciousness darted lightning-like to fill wires that were becoming newly available. She found herself simultaneously in thousands of cities, listening to a babble of conversations, engaged in a million activities. Some tasks were overtly military, but others were bland desk jobs, people doing nothing. She could have entered them, made them move as she wished, but she sensed that it would take time to learn how to coordinate such complex actions; she might cause too much chaos.

  Patience.

  In the meantime, she had yet to find the source of that original order, which had trickled down to Snozay Central from somewhere very high in the information hierarchy. There were many more rungs on the ladder.

  Up she went.

  It was day and night at once now, winter and summer simultaneously. The planet’s hemispheres were bridged. She was asleep and awake, speaking languages that at first she didn’t understand, though she had access to so many speech interpreters that her comprehension grew instantaneously.

  She was everywhere. Kali reached out and covered the world, waking up inside of everyone. She wondered if they could feel her coming to life inside them, peering out through their masks; she looked at herself and saw starts of recognition, though that couldn’t last long before she had to look away. Feedback was a constant danger. Still, it was hard to control her excitement: earth was like a huge toy begging to be played with.

  At the same time, she felt something odd going on inside herself.

  It felt . . . it felt as if something were waking up and looking around inside of her.