by Mur Lafferty
Hiro didn’t answer. He didn’t answer anything else she said to him that day. He stayed on his cot, staring at the ceiling, until lights-out. Then he stared at the darkness.
The next day, he signed the legal document stating he was an illegal spare clone and he was submitting to euthanasia.
He didn’t ask how Lo got the other two—the yadokari, as he thought of them—to consent to it. He figured he would know soon enough.
Wake Three:
Hiro
Maria saw the attack coming. She wouldn’t admit this to anyone, but she doubted she’d have to.
Besides, that wasn’t her immediate problem.
She knew about yadokari, although she hadn’t thought about them in a while. Going beyond the minor hacking of mindmaps, it was the actual implantation of something completely new in someone’s mind. Very few hackers could do it; even fewer could do it well. Maria remembered hearing about botched jobs, called hatchet jobs, which ruined someone’s mind forever.
A yadokari. It was the reason why he had lunged for her when she pressed him. Like throwing chum to sharks.
She was ready for him, though, and stepped out of the way, almost too slowly. He stumbled past her and she pushed him facedown into the dirt. She tried to pin him to the soft earth but he rolled over and punched her. Her head snapped back and she lost her grip, and he lifted his hips and threw her off him.
Fighting in stronger gravity than you were accustomed to was strange. Her body seemed heavy and slow, and Hiro was about her size. He landed on top of her and tried to slam her head into the ground, but the water had made the dirt soft. It hurt, but not as bad as he’d intended it.
She blinked up at him, his face hard. Above his head, a metallic insect buzzed by.
IAN’s eyes are awake, thank God.
“How did you know?” he asked through gritted teeth, his hands tightening around her neck. His voice had a familiar short and clipped tone, lacking the friendliness of the pilot he had been. “How did you know how to bring me out?”
She brought her forearms together to pinch his, lessening the pressure on her neck. She tried to throw him off her, but he had wedged his feet under her, keeping himself from falling off.
“You’re the one who said the magic word,” she wheezed. “I just encouraged you to come out.”
“Hiro and Maria, I’ve alerted the captain to the altercation. She will be here in approximately two minutes.” IAN’s voice sounded far away coming from the speaker on the dropped tablet.
Hiro swore and slammed her to the ground one last time before getting off her. Maria snagged his cuff before he could run off. He stumbled and kicked back at her.
“And what the hell are you?” she asked, pulling hard on his cuff.
“Oh, I’m still Hiro. I’ve just had the weakness stripped out of me,” he said. “Now let me go.” He raised his foot and stomped on her wrist. She cried out in pain and let him go.
She tried to get up and chase him, but her ears were ringing from the punch and the choking. She cradled her wrist against her chest. By the time she had gotten to her feet, he was gone into the gardens.
So. A psychopath. Someone took Hiro and stripped out his humanity completely.
“I’m sorry, Hiro. You don’t deserve a yadokari and you don’t deserve this,” she muttered. She went to the fallen tablet. “IAN, did you see where he went?”
“He’s in the orchard. I can’t see him but I can send the bees in.”
She glanced up at the gradually increasing light. “Is Katrina really on her way?”
“No, I wanted to see what he would do,” IAN said.
“So you just lied to get him off me? Don’t you think the captain should know?”
“Probably. And you’re welcome, by the way.”
She flexed her wrist and winced. It was badly sprained, but probably not broken. Her face throbbed from where he had hit her. “Fine, I’ll get her.”
“I alerted her, just not at the moment I told you. She’s on her way now,” IAN said. “Gosh, you’d think you didn’t trust me.”
“This is so bad,” she muttered, brushing her hair out of her face and taking a deep breath.
She didn’t know whether to run or keep an eye on Hiro. She wasn’t security. She backed up toward the door, craning her neck to find the orchard.
The garden was definitely an amazing place in the light. The lake was nearby, and she could barely hear the water recyclers churning away below. Flowers bloomed around the pond, interrupted by patches of green herbs. As she passed them, she snagged samples of each herb she found.
She finally spotted the orchard, far to the left, meaning he had run slightly up the wall to reach it.
IAN chirped to life again. “Don’t worry, the cavalry’s almost there.”
“I’m not worried,” she said. “I’m getting out of here.”
“Yes, but if I had acknowledged that, I couldn’t use my cavalry joke,” he said.
“You’re joking now? You sound like a human,” she said, nearing the door.
“I’m at about ninety percent recovered. Not counting the cameras that are out.”
“Good,” Maria said. She came up against the door. “When I’m out of here, lock the door.”
Locking him inside the largest area of the ship. That’s safe.
Joanna and Wolfgang planned on recycling the bodies that morning, but the alert from IAN interrupted everything.
“I should tell you that Hiro attacked Maria in the garden, moments ago, actually. She is injured, he is running away,” IAN said, in a pleasant, announcing-the-weather voice.
“Shit,” Wolfgang said, and they left the bodies in the hallway and ran for the ladder to the garden. The captain met them at the ladder, her jaw set and fury in her eyes.
Wolfgang didn’t like the garden. It was a lower level than their living space, but higher than the bottom floor so it could contain the necessary under-the-surface life requirements such as a deep lake and tree roots. So the gravity wasn’t as intense as it was on the lowest floor, but it was heavier than Wolfgang was accustomed to.
Still, he led the way down the ladder, going as fast as he dared even as each step made him heavier and heavier.
At the foot, they found Maria leaning against the yellow door, panting. The left side of her face was swelling, and she had red marks on her neck. She held her right wrist protectively to her chest.
“What happened?” Katrina demanded.
Joanna held out her hand. “Wrist.”
Maria surrendered her injured arm to Joanna’s inspection. “Hiro happened,” she said. She explained that she and Hiro had gone to talk in the gardens, and that he had lost his mind and started attacking her out of the blue.
“I think he had a yadokari,” she said.
Wolfgang wasn’t very fluent with languages. “Noodles?”
“No, an illegal implanted personality,” Joanna said to him, making a face. She focused back on Maria. “Those are very rare. I’ve never seen a legitimate one work as well as one would have had to work with Hiro.”
“It’s possible. I’ve done a lot of research on them,” Maria said. “And he confirmed it. I think he’s still Hiro, but with all the humanity stripped away.”
“Probably only doing that to get an alibi,” Wolfgang said, scoffing. He raised his voice to imitate Hiro’s. “I didn’t do it, it was my implanted personality! I think we have our killer.”
“Not necessarily,” Joanna said softly.
“You take care of her,” he said, ignoring Joanna’s contradiction. “Captain?”
Katrina nodded grimly. “Let’s go.”
Joanna took a shaking Maria back to the medbay and sat her down on the second hospital bed. She took Maria’s chin gently, tilting it left and right. “You’re going to have an impressive shiner,” she said. “Is your vision all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Maria said. “I’m more worried about my wrist.”
Joanna determined that Ma
ria’s wrist was sprained but not broken, and got a bandage for it. She started wrapping the injury carefully. “When everything calms down, we can get a nanobot drip to help you recover faster.”
“Why don’t you use that on her?” Maria asked, jerking her head toward the captain’s clone.
“Brain injuries are beyond the capability of most nanobots, except in specific centers on Earth, and they’re amazingly expensive. Like a lot of things, we didn’t think clones would need them.” She glanced up at Maria as she secured the bandage. “How are you really?”
“I don’t know. Scared. Worried about Hiro. I thought we were becoming friends. This isn’t his fault.” Her left hand shook as she brushed her hair back.
“But you shouldn’t be alone with him again,” Joanna said, looking through her cabinets for a sedative. She found one and broke it in half.
“God, no,” Maria blurted, and then laughed nervously. “I’m not stupid.” Maria took the sedative Joanna handed her and held it in her palm. “Do I have to?”
“You’re a mess. It’ll help the pain and let you get some rest. I’ll leave you in here to sleep, door locked.”
Maria nodded and dry-swallowed the tablet. Then she fished around in her pockets. “Oh, and I need you to test it, but I’m pretty sure that I found hemlock growing in the garden.”
“Why would this be growing there?” Joanna took the herb gingerly and held it up to the light.
“To give the food printer something to copy?” Maria guessed. “They’re not preprogrammed to print poison, you know.”
“I’ll test it, but you’re very likely right,” Joanna said.
“I can take a look at that for you,” IAN said. “Hold it up to my cameras. The working one, not the one you taped over in your office, Joanna.”
“I guess you have more eyes now?” Joanna asked, feeling her face grow warm.
“Getting there.”
She held the herb up to the camera on the wall, turning it slowly so he could see all sides.
“Definitely hemlock,” IAN said.
“I suppose teaching the food printer how to do it was a redundancy in case the plant didn’t take in the garden,” Joanna said.
“Whatever. Let’s burn it,” Maria said, her eyelids growing heavy.
“Let’s not set a fire on a spaceship,” Joanna said gently, encouraging her to lie back on the bed. “We can dig it out.”
“Joanna, do you think Hiro did it?” Maria asked as she settled back on the pillow.
“It doesn’t look good for him, but we don’t have all the information yet,” Joanna said, not voicing her doubts. “Let’s find him first. But that’s not your job, you need to get some rest.”
“It wasn’t him. I’m sure of it. He’s stuck inside there with that thing. No wonder he sometimes was an asshole just out of the blue. But I don’t trust him anymore.” Maria drifted off to sleep.
Maria has a thankless job. We should be more grateful to her.
Maria’s Story
211 Years Ago
July 10, 2282
Dr. Maria Arena smoothed the gray suit over her thighs, then sternly told herself not to be nervous. She was over one hundred years old and had dealt with clients before. Not necessarily in this case, admittedly. She was dabbling in some serious business now, but she knew her trade, and even in a fancy pantsuit, she was still herself.
A disgraced and unemployable pariah, but still herself.
The self-driving limousine stopped and a doorman hurried to help her out of the car. The silk-blend clothing caressed her skin, making her shiver. She accepted the help, feeling ridiculous, considering she wasn’t wearing heels or a dress.
“Dr. Arena,” the doorman murmured. “Welcome to Firetown.”
Firetown was the tallest building in the world, one full kilometer tall, built like a city so that no one ever had to leave. It had a shopping mall, hotels, grocery stores, hospitals, nightclubs, theaters, parks, fitness centers; it even had a homeless population squatting on the fifty-first floor. It did not have any places of worship.
Firetown was built in New York City at the site of the first clone uprising. The owner of the building, Sallie Mignon, had built it as a safe haven for clones. One-third of the world’s population of clones lived in the building. Maria had never visited it before, and was in awe.
They walked through the foyer, which looked a lot like a hotel, with a reception desk staffed with smartly dressed people and mirrored walls. Maria caught her reflection and stood a little taller. She stopped by the desk.
“Dr. Maria Arena, I should be expected,” she said to the short, brown-skinned woman behind the desk.
The woman, whose name tag said GAJRA, smiled, brushed her long sheet of black hair out of her face, and nodded to Maria. “You are, Dr. Arena,” she said. “Please let me show you to our VIP lift.”
She led Maria past a mass of at least twenty elevators, where people waited patiently in a long queue, and down a hallway decorated with red-and-gold damask wallpaper. She opened a door with a key card and ushered Maria in before her.
A smaller lobby was here, looking like an outdoor grotto with plants, stone floors, a fountain, and a couple of beautiful people lazing about. Maria wondered if they were paid to make the place look desirable, and thought it would be an easy, but dreadfully dull, job.
One elevator stood in the center of the far wall, and Gajra used her key card again and smiled. “Right this way,” she said when the doors opened.
“Which floor?” Maria asked, stepping into the elevator, which, with blue carpet and mirrored walls, was as posh as the rest of the place.
“There is only one choice,” Gajra said, pointing to the button on the console. It said “95.” The doors closed on Gajra’s smile, and Maria took a deep breath. The console didn’t even have OPEN DOOR and CLOSE DOOR buttons, and no emergency phone, but she had to trust in superior architecture. She pushed “95” and prepared herself for the ear-popping journey.
After two floors, the back wall disappeared and she saw that the elevator was glass, mirrored only on three sides, and open to the world on the fourth. She rose with an odd sense that it was the city moving away from her, not herself rising above it.
She closed her eyes against the vertigo, higher than she had ever been aside from planes. She faced the doors and took another deep breath. You’ve got this.
The doors opened into a penthouse that defied logic. It looked more like a museum, complete with priceless paintings and statues and marble floors, but in a disjointed way, sippy cups and toy trucks sat on tables and a half-eaten energy bar was on the floor. Maria was surprised; clones were sterilized on a DNA level, and most were happy to be. Cloning was an inherently selfish action, after all; you left your inheritance to your next incarnation. But they could be stepkids, or children of a family member, or fosters, or adopted kids. She then remembered something about Sallie’s human partner having children.
A small gray shih tzu hurtled down the hall, screaming at her, and she nudged the discarded energy bar at it, distracting it. It got its teeth into the bar and dragged it away, growling.
“Well, you know how to handle Titan, I’ll give you that,” said a voice behind her.
Sallie Mignon was small, compact, with warm brown skin and light-brown hair that surrounded her head in a halo. She didn’t look like one of the most ruthless businesswomen in the world, the one who’d single-handedly ruined AT&Veriz because her business rival, Ben Seims, was named CEO. Once they went bankrupt, she bought them out and fired him. The woman had made her billions in vertical real estate, financing hugely tall buildings and even, some said, part of the Luna dome. Rumors were rampant about her, behind closed doors and in the tabloids. She was one of the first clones, she was the first clone, she killed the first clone, she was going to influence a law change to let clones hold office again, she already ran the president like a puppet. She had a stable of spies entrenched in every competitor’s staff, at VP or higher. She made a
small fortune just by selling short at the right time and was never caught insider trading. She had stopped a war brewing between Russia and Australia because her college buddy lived in Guam and didn’t want to be caught in the middle. She’d tried to get the war started because an ex-lover lived in Guam and she wanted him caught in the middle.
Rumors were everywhere, but everyone agreed that Sallie Mignon and Guam were somehow involved. And the war didn’t happen, to the world’s relief.
Currently she wore a stained sweatshirt and a pair of silk-denim-blend jeans.
She held out her hand to Maria, who shook it. She walked past her and gestured for her to follow, casually removing the yellow yarn that had been strung around a statue in the foyer.
“I need some programming done,” Sallie said as she led Maria into the kitchen. It was the kind of gleaming, state-of-the-art kitchen you found in home magazines, only it looked actually lived in, with dirty dishes in the sink, a linen grocery bag discarded in the corner, and a philodendron that needed watering.
“I, ah, ma’am, I am not a programmer,” Maria said out of habit.
Sallie looked over her shoulder, her eyes catching and holding Maria’s. “Yeah, I know the jargon. But you’re safe here. I even told my maid not to come today,” she said, pointing at the dirty dishes. “The nanny took the kids to floor forty-five to a movie. In short, cut the bullshit and don’t waste my time. You’re a programmer. I need programming done.”
“All right. Then what kind of programming do you need?” Maria said, the word feeling verboten in her mouth.
Even though the world summit to determine the rights of clones was a few months away, the United States and Cuba already had created local laws to control what in a clone’s mindmap could be edited. Everyone assumed the world would follow North America’s lead.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Maria was currently out of a job. Talented programmers were getting fired—and socially outcast—all over the place. Most went back to school to learn another trade, but some stubbornly kept doing it, only underground.