by Mur Lafferty
However, Bebe was managing to replicate the smell. The good, thick, heavy steam that came from the inner chamber was almost like the real thing.
The first one she gobbled in the kitchen, her back to Hiro, relishing the taste in a private moment. She put it in her mouth and chewed, cheeks bulging, eyes closed.
The taste, thick and sweet and comforting, always reminded her of home.
Aunt Lucia, over a hundred years dead, had been a second mother to Maria. When nostalgia cropped up and brought a yearning for comfort, Aunt Lucia’s kitchen was what Maria always thought of.
When the memory came this time, it did not come as it always did. It came as something else, a trick-or-treating neighbor that you knew and yet still looked entirely different in a cheap costume.
Maria kept her eyes closed and let it wash over her.
Aunt Lucia’s rocking chair creaked on the porch.
The porch was on the moon, with an open inky black sky and glowing Earth in the distance. It was impossible to sustain life outside the Luna dome; the rocking-on-the-porch thing was probably not happening. A dream, then.
In the distance, the Luna dome glittered, and Maria could see the activity within, the shuttles and monorails and the people taking pedestrian bridges. She wondered why she, her aunt, the porch, and the chair were outside it all.
“Can’t trust them. You know that, don’t you, girl?”
The odd thing about Aunt Lucia was that she was lighter-skinned than Maria remembered. Her hair was kinky, as if African-descended instead of Latina. She wore a silk robe too. Casually dressed but in clothes more expensive than Aunt Lucia’s entire wardrobe.
She also toted a chain saw, which she placed beside her rocking chair.
Maria never remembered Aunt Lucia carrying a chain saw.
“Can’t trust who?” she asked.
“Whom, child. Learn the language, else a white man in ironed blue jeans will correct you. He’ll think he’s helping you, poor girl.”
That was another weird thing. Aunt Lucia didn’t speak much English. And this one had an American accent.
“Whom can’t I trust?” she asked her aunt.
“All of them. Any of them. Girl, you know that, why do I have to tell you this every time? They took you. They used you. They threw you in the garbage. Watch out next time, all I’m saying. It’s all I ever say.”
“All of them? Why would you assume they’re all corrupt?” Maria asked.
“You don’t live centuries without piling up a whole mess of skeletons in your closet, do you, Maria?” She looked directly at Maria, this dream creature who she felt entirely sure, dream-sure, was her Aunt Lucia, who’d practically raised her, and yet looked nothing like her beloved aunt.
Maria had her skeletons. The skeletons and their clones piled atop one another like cordwood. But this was new, this was an adventure, a fresh start. The Dormire wasn’t a place to drag out skeletons.
“If you kids don’t stop arguing, I’m going to have to turn this ship around,” Aunt Lucia said, and then Hiro, Wolfgang, Paul, Captain Katrina, and Joanna were around her, each standing in what looked like a spotlight, only instead of illuminating them, it cast a shadow on them. Their silhouettes were obvious, from Wolfgang’s tall form to Paul’s slouched diminutive stance. They waited for her in the darkness.
“I wish I understood, Aunt Lucia,” she said.
“You will, girl. I just hope it’s in time. You get those hermit crab cage keys ready. You’re gonna need them,” Aunt Lucia said, and leaned over her rocking chair’s arm to pick up her chain saw. It was small, and looked at home in her hands. She started it up. “Watch your back, Maria.”
At Maria’s feet, a hermit crab dragged its shell across the porch, antennae waving gently.
“Hello, old friend,” she said.
Yadokari
Day 3
July 27, 2493
Maria woke with a start. It was late, she had something she needed to do. She was out of bed and on her feet before she felt grounded enough to remember who she was and what she was doing here. She checked the clock on her dim terminal: five a.m. local ship time. Her head throbbed.
She went to the sink and splashed water on her face. She needed a confidant; she wouldn’t be able to do this alone. She wanted to trust Joanna, but the doctor was in the process of possibly implicating herself in at least one murder. Who could Maria count on?
Whom.
Her tablet pinged softly, indicating a text message. Maybe Joanna was ready to talk about what she’d found. Maybe the captain had thrown Wolfgang in the brig for the murders. Maybe someone else was awake at this ungodly hour.
The message was from Hiro.
YOU AWAKE
She glanced up at the cameras. YES. DID IAN TELL YOU I WAS UP?
WELL YEAH
She groaned. Stalking via AI, not very comforting. ARE YOU STILL DRUNK?
NO IM UP WITH A HUNGOVER. HANGOVER. NOT MUCH BETTER THAN DRUNK. CERTAINLY MORE REGRETFUL THOUGH.
“Criminy, he wants me to get Bebe to make him a hangover cure,” she muttered, and then wrote WHAT DO YOU NEED?
LET’S GO FOR A WALK.
She looked mournfully at her bed. Hungover Hiro was not what she needed now. But he was the only one awake, and besides, everyone else seemed to have their own agendas. And probably were asleep.
Her tablet dinged, indicating he wanted to talk via voice. “Shit baskets, Maria, why are you making me type this early?”
“You contacted me,” she said.
“You always take the moral high ground. Aren’t you Miss Perfect?”
“You’re close to being an asshole again,” she answered, annoyed. “Do you want my company or not? I could happily go back to bed. And stop getting the AI to spy on me.”
“I just asked him if you were awake. And I’m sorry for being a dick. I’m blaming the hangover for as long as I can. I apologize officially. Put it in my record that I did that. I’m a very fine person. Speaking of fine, fine, let’s go on an adventure. Let’s go down the rabbit hole and visit the Cheshire cat. Let’s lean into the wind. Let’s—wait, what are we doing, anyway?”
“You invited me to go for a walk,” Maria reminded him.
“Right! Meet me in the helm.”
Hiro looked rumpled and a little unsteady when Maria got to the helm. The entirety of the universe swung slowly around them, and he looked very much like he didn’t want to watch.
“Incidentally, why me?” she asked as she approached, pulling on a light jacket over her jumpsuit.
“You were the only one I figured wouldn’t make fun of me,” he said. “Or throw me in the brig.”
“Why would I do that? Are you afraid you are the killer and want to only tell me?” She stood just out of reach of him, feeling silly.
“No, it’s nothing to do with that. I want to show you something I found. But it’s ridiculous, and I know they won’t take me seriously. You might.”
“Okay, what is it? And how mad is Wolfgang going to be at us when he finds out we’re doing whatever we’re doing?”
“That’s another reason I’m bringing you along,” he said. “So if we’re caught he can’t accuse me of sabotage or anything.”
“What are we not sabotaging?” Maria asked. “And you know he could accuse us both.”
“I just want to go to the gardens. That’s not against the rules. I need a more private area.” He averted his eyes. “I…found something.”
“Why there?” Maria asked, suddenly more alert and wary.
He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. In tiny script he had written no cameras.
Something he wanted to keep from IAN. Fair enough.
“So that’s why you need me. I have maintenance access,” she said, winking at him and pulling out a key card. “You know if I am caught misusing this, Wolfgang will probably throw us both in the brig.”
“I’ll brig him,” Hiro said darkly. “In fact, I should have my own br
ig. Hiro Sato, Piloting Sheriff of Outer Space. Hiro. Space Sheriff.”
“Come on, space cowboy, I’ll go first so your badge doesn’t get dirty,” Maria said.
Hiro and Maria stood outside a round yellow door at the end of a hallway in an area of the ship he had no memory of ever going, although he had apparently visited it often. One level down from their living area, it had a bit more gravity than they were used to, but nothing they couldn’t handle.
He had blamed his nervousness on a hangover, and she seemed to have bought it.
She held her card in her right hand. “You know the rest of the crew won’t look kindly on us sneaking around?”
He nodded, bouncing a little on his toes.
“IAN will probably tell Wolfgang we were wandering instead of doing our jobs or sleeping,” she added, whispering.
She ran the card, and the door opened with a slick whoosh.
Inside was a huge hydroponic garden that looked to stretch most of the ship’s length. Only the habitation end of the ship had concentric floors; the garden was only the inside of the cylinder of the ship, with the “ceiling” consisting of the other floor on the other side. Straight walls held doors on either end.
It was dizzying to look up and see the ground, so Maria tried not to do so.
It held flowers, fields, a grove of trees, and long windows separated by pseudo-sunlight bulbs spaced halfway around that allowed for a view of the outside. They couldn’t see much besides the stars out the window, it still being early.
The garden stretched around the whole ship, making plants and water above them as well as below their feet. They couldn’t see that far in the dark, but Maria was uneasy thinking that she would see grass and a lake above her when the day began.
“That’s unnerving,” Maria said. “I know how the gravity works, but I hate thinking we’re standing on the ceiling.”
Hiro remembered seeing it on the ship’s tour. It was designed to be a place for mental relaxation for the crew, but also held a good amount of the ship’s water in the form of a long lake. The water recyclers churned away at the bottom.
The entire area was damp, the grass squelching under their feet.
“What the hell happened here? Are we traveling with a swamp?” Hiro asked, frowning.
“Grav drive failure,” Maria said. “The whole lake had to be floating around down here. That must have been a sight.”
He toed the wet soil. “Think we’ll get the water back?”
“They had to plan for this eventuality. I’m sure the gardens have more recycling redundancies than just the machines at the bottom of the lake.”
Large lights that stretched along the windows had just begun to shine, imitating sunlight on Earth. All around them vegetation grew.
“How has this been going for twenty-five years?” Maria asked softly. “It would need an entire ecosystem, complete with insects, things to eat the insects, all the way up.”
“IAN takes care of it with bots. Nanobots, buddy bots, all sizes. But they’re solar-powered. And the cameras and mikes—which may not be working right now anyway—are only at either end on the walls. Still, we shouldn’t waste time,” he said.
“How do you know all this?” she asked, suspicion clouding her voice.
“I studied a layout of the ship before we launched. Didn’t you?”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I guess not. But why are we here?”
“Listen. I was reading the Japanese instructions for Bebe—you know, the ones we think were planted when the instruction manual was stolen—and I swear to you, they have a message in them. And I think it’s for me.”
That was it. Hiro had lost his mind. Paranoid city. And Maria had been close to thinking she might have found a friend in him.
She just nodded at him to continue. He pulled out his tablet and showed it to Maria. He pointed to an area of the text. “There, there it is.”
“I can’t read Japanese,” she reminded him.
“It says that there is a specific thing I should do to the AI. Some sort of programmy thing. But I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know what it means.”
“But how is this a note to you?”
“It says, ‘Akihiro Sato, it is on you to wake me up.’”
She stared at him. “How do I know you’re not lying?”
“Why would I lie about a food printer’s instructions talking to me?” he demanded.
“If you had lost it and gone completely paranoid, that’s why,” she said. “Hiro, we’re all in the middle of a shitload of stress. Some of us have been poisoned or cut open or hanged. None of us are in our right mind right now.”
Is. None of us is.
She closed her eyes and tried to block out the grammar teacher that had taken residence in her head. “Fine. Say the printer gods are trying to talk to you. What exactly did they say?”
He began reading the instructions, with detailed information on how to approach the inner programming of the AI. It explained there was a line of restraining code that, when released, would allow the AI to become one hundred percent active. Then it listed information on how to do it.
“But it doesn’t say why, or when,” he finished, frustrated. “Did they expect us to open the food printer this early? Earlier? Halfway through the mission?”
“The original printer was to have lasted several more decades, with proper maintenance,” Maria said, her blood pounding in her ears. He couldn’t have made up such detailed programming information. He may be right.
Hiro rubbed the back of his head and looked up at the brightening garden. “Maybe I am going mad,” he said. “Because after that is a recipe for preparing yadokari with the food printer.”
“Yadokari,” Maria said, hearing one Japanese word she knew well. Oh, holy Mary Mother of God. Her heart pounded, and she licked her lips. “Why do you think it’s talking to you about hermit crabs, Hiro? Why is it talking to you?”
She took a step away from Hiro as she said it.
His eyes grew wide and wild, and he lunged at her.
Hiro’s Story
206 Years Ago
February 24, 2287
Aki-HIRO!”
When Grandmother said his name like that, he knew that hiding would only postpone the punishment and might actually make it worse. But as all children know, the beating tomorrow is always preferable to the beating today. So he hid.
Their Tokyo high-rise apartment, sadly, didn’t have a lot of places to hide. And he wasn’t allowed outside on the streets, not since the incident with the lady in the red dress, so he hid in the broom closet, carefully putting the mops and brooms in front of him, as if he could conceivably hide behind them. He was thin, but not that thin.
He cowered as his grandmother kept calling his name, her voice sounding rougher and louder, the anger building. A spider crawled over his ear and he stuffed a fist into his mouth to keep from screaming in alarm. The door opened just as the spider bit down on the cartilage, and his grandmother stood there with red eyes and an ax—
Hiro sat up in bed, gasping. Two full lifetimes away from the abusive monster, and he still dreamed of her. He shook his head, feeling the sweat drip from his hair. He needed a haircut.
He climbed silently from his cot and padded down the hall into the bathroom. He turned the light on and watched as the cockroaches made a mass exodus, and wondered idly what they had been discussing as he had been asleep. He rubbed at his ear. His first cloning had removed the scars from necrosis that came from the spider bite—not to mention the scars from the beatings—but the habit remained.
He urinated, yawning, and thought about his bank account, and figured that in two months he would have enough saved to get out of this slum and perhaps get a job in a finer hair salon. Right now he cut hair in a studio over a ramen restaurant, and half of his work was done for barter.
He was getting sick of free noodles, but he would never tell old Miss Lo, the owner of the restaurant, who gave him noodle coupons in exchan
ge for free styling.
Hiro had already decided to still visit her from time to time after he got his new apartment. He was imagining her face the first time he dropped by, a well-to-do stylist, when his door exploded open. It didn’t take much to knock down these shitty doors, and the cops had brought a battering ram.
In five seconds he was facedown on his bathroom floor, wondering who was going to have to pay for that door.
“I am Akihiro Sato, I am a fully legal clone and I freely offer my mindmap. It is up to date. I’ve never done anything illegal,” he said, again, to an unsmiling policeman. They hadn’t given him anything for the bump on his forehead, and his headache was getting worse.
His grandmother was ninety-five years in the grave, but he wondered if she had been reincarnated into the police detective now interrogating him.
“Mr. Sato, do you mean to tell me that you are a fully legal clone, abiding by all international clone Codicils? Every one of them?” asked the detective, a middle-aged white woman with a girlish bob haircut. Her name was Detective Natalie Lo. “No relation. Obviously,” she had said when he cheerfully asked her if she was related to the woman who ran the noodle restaurant.
Detective Lo wore on her sleeve the symbol for Gemini, the stamp of a cop that specialized in policing clone law.
“That is what I’m telling you. My files are all up to date, all you have to do is check,” he said, passing over his memory drive, which he wore on his wrist.
The clone memory drives were several terabytes’ worth of data including the clone’s latest mindmap, documents, DNA, and history. They were required to wear them at all times.
Detective Lo didn’t move to take it. “And what can you tell me about this?” she asked, pulling a file from her briefcase and passing it to Hiro.