by Mur Lafferty
Wolfgang balled his fists again and stomped to his quarters.
IAN spoke again, dropping his voice to mimic Wolfgang. “‘Thank you, IAN. You’re a valued member of this crew.’” His voice crept higher to his usual tone. “‘No sweat, Wolfgang, it’s a pleasure to serve.’”
“I want you to keep an eye on Maria and Joanna. Tell me if something happens in the medbay. Don’t speak to anyone, though.”
“Sure thing,” he said. “Have you decided what to charge Paul with? Don’t you want to know what happened in the first year of the trip?”
He paused at his door. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t hear Maria mention Paul’s incident the first year of the journey? Something violent happened. You hit him hard enough to cause brain damage and knocked out whatever it was that caused him to lose control. You should pay more attention.”
Wolfgang really wished IAN was something physical that he could hit. He needed to hit something right now.
Maria sat in her cell. She felt strangely calm. At least she didn’t have her secret anymore. She inspected the terminal, but couldn’t find a way to access it. “Hey, IAN?” she ventured.
“Yes?”
“I’m surprised you’re allowed to talk to me.”
“I’m not.”
Maria paused, confused. “Then why are you?”
“Because I want to. And I really want to figure out what’s going on here.”
“Do you know how Wolfgang is going to manage this ship with four of us restrained?” she asked.
“He’s trying to figure out if he can run the ship with just him and Paul. But then I told him about Paul’s incident in the first year, by the way. Anyway, Wolfgang will ask me to help out until he gets mad at me, I suspect,” IAN said. “Then he’ll try to figure out a way to lock me up too.”
“Can you open a channel to the other terminal so Joanna and I can talk?”
“No problem.”
“Joanna, you okay in there?” Maria said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” Joanna said through the speaker. She sounded very sad.
“I figured if we talked we might be able to figure some stuff out.”
“I’m listening.”
“Oh, don’t sound so down,” Maria said. “Wolfgang can’t fly this boat on his own. He’s going to have to let us out the first time he stubs a toe or Bebe breaks down. IAN can’t do it all for him.”
“Still. I betrayed his trust,” she said. “But you didn’t betray mine,” she added, realization coloring her voice. “You didn’t tell anyone about the syringe you found.”
Maria shrugged, the remembered Joanna couldn’t see her. “Well, no. You said you wanted to tell him yourself.”
“So what do you have in mind?”
“We can still work on the cloning bay problem. Figure out what’s going on here. All that stuff.”
“How can we do that?”
“IAN is here. I can ask him to do things via the computers, and he can let us know what’s going on. He can tell us what’s happening in the medbay. Anyway, we’re sitting here with absolutely nothing else to do except think, right?”
“You’ve got that right.”
“Let’s start with full disclosure. I want to know more about you. And I can tell you more about me.”
“There’s more?”
Maria grimaced and leaned back on the sparse cot. “There’s always more, Doctor.”
Maria shifted to get comfortable, turning over a few times and deciding that there was no comfortable position. The floor might actually be better.
“I was a programmer before the Codicils forced me underground. I was really good at it. People hired me for many things, mostly removing genetic diseases. Adult diseases that led to death, by the way. I was not involved with the bathtub babies, I swear.”
She grimaced. “No. I’m lying. I promised full disclosure. One. I did one and it was so horrible I promised myself to never work on children again.” She swallowed and waited for Joanna to say something.
“People like you caused the Codicils to be written, you know,” Joanna said softly.
“Well, not just me,” Maria protested. “After the Codicils passed, the only thing people needed my skills for was the typical hacking, removing reproductive capabilities for new clones. I figured the law couldn’t dictate my ethics so I kept doing my job for interested parties.”
“You could have been the one who erased our memories.”
“Didn’t you hear my log? I erased nothing, I used the only backup I had to keep us as much ourselves as I could. All the logs were stripped some other way.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I started getting some very wealthy clients. Then Sallie Mignon took me on and I worked for her for about a century, but we parted on not-so-good terms. Soon after that, without her protection, a lot of my past caught up with me and I was implicated in a lot of crimes.”
“Things you were guilty of,” Joanna said. She didn’t ask.
“Well, yes. I didn’t consider them unethical, just programming jobs I had done. I didn’t reveal my patron, and she had covered her tracks regarding our connection. I kept my clients’ secrets, so I was the only one who went to jail. To pay me back for keeping her secrets, Mignon got me this gig.”
“Sallie Mignon,” Joanna said. “I didn’t know she had so much to do with this ship.”
“I guess she did. She has a right; she paid for a lot of it, she got the clone server aboard, even after the riots endangered our chances to be on the trip, and she’s in the server with her partner and children.”
“Sallie Mignon set me up here too. I’m getting free of some political crimes, mostly involving cloning and money. I am not entirely sure I wasn’t framed; I could never prove it. It was my punishment for being a traitor to clones and letting the Codicils go through.”
She told Maria about her political past, and Maria listened in fascination.
“You and Wolfgang have a connection,” Maria said thoughtfully. “Those odds are pretty astronomical.”
“I’ve thought the same thing,” Joanna said. “Are you connected to anyone directly?”
Maria thought hard, through all past lives. “Not that I can remember,” she said truthfully.
“Let’s look at the cloning machine problems,” Joanna suggested. “IAN, are you here?”
“You bet, Joanna,” IAN said.
“We’re going to need you to go deep, like you went for Maria’s logs, and see if you can scrounge up anything from the cloning data.”
“I’m at your service,” IAN said gallantly.
Maria and Joanna began to talk cloning technology in earnest. The feeling of finally getting to move on a project because they were locked up was an odd kind of freedom.
Maria’s Story
211 Years Ago
September 27, 2282
Come to the Java Blues Coffee House, Thursday, 4 p.m., read the postcard handed to Maria by a red-uniformed young woman.
It was almost more conspicuous at this point, using the private courier. No one seemed to use it except people who very obviously wanted to send a private letter, and using the red uniforms seemed to draw major attention to the fact.
She tipped the courier (physical money, naturally) and closed the door. Sallie hadn’t needed Maria’s services for a few months—not since she had updated her spouse’s DNA matrix to fix the MS—but the billionaire had kept her on retainer. And Sallie was the only one who used the courier service.
Later, Maria would have plenty of time to kick herself for her logical flaws. But for now, she took it in good faith that the person summoning her was the woman who was sending a great deal of money to her account every month for no reason beyond being on call.
Java Blues Coffee House closed at three p.m., Maria discovered, and frowned at the note on the door. She turned around in time to see the bag come over her head and have her arms wrenched behind her. A pinprick on her arm, and she was out.
Escaping an Earthly kidnapper wouldn’t be that big a problem. Not as difficult as escaping the moon was going to be.
She shifted uncomfortably. Her hands had gone numb in the hours behind her back, and her shoulder ached. Her few attempts at speaking to her captors had gotten her nothing, so she didn’t plead now.
They finally landed. The diminished lunar gravity was bizarre, and she got up too fast, hitting the overhead compartment of the shuttle. She heard a snicker. She sighed.
The bag came off her head and she took a deep breath that didn’t smell of synthetic breathable plastic. Her captors looked like vacationers, two men dressed in bright colors, wearing wedding rings and matching leather bracelets.
One, the redhead, smiled widely at her. “It was so nice to meet you on the shuttle! Can you come with us for a drink to celebrate our honeymoon?”
The other one, taller, thinner, with black hair and olive skin, nodded and beamed. He took her arms, slit the plastic holding her wrists together, and then held the knife to the small of her back.
“My husband is very talented with food,” the redhead babbled as they exited the shuttle. “He can debone a chicken in ten seconds flat!”
“That’s wonderful,” Maria said, arching her back a bit to get away from the knife, but Dark Hair just moved it with her.
They entered a crowded monorail and Maria was baffled to see that no one gave them a second glance. She tried to meet someone’s eyes, beg for help, but they acted like anyone on public transport in a city and minded their own business. The redhead chattered away about their honeymoon and Dark Hair’s skill as a chef and his own career aspirations to become a shuttle pilot so he could come to Luna whenever he wanted. She wanted to enjoy the view of the Luna dome as they took the monorail along the inside of it, but she was too busy sweating and trying to inch her back away from that knife.
They stopped in what looked like a business district, and were the only ones to exit. It was late according to local Luna time, and the streets were deserted. Her captors led Maria into a white building and down a hall. She lost count of how many doors they went through and how many turns they took. From the number of stairs they walked down, she guessed they were going under the moon’s surface.
After forever, she got to one last door and entered after Redhead. He pushed her into a chair, the newlywed-in-love act dropped. She bounced a little and then settled.
The windowless room had three people besides her in it, her two “escorts” and a third man, all looking tall and Luna-born. They were in a computer lab adjacent to a cloning lab. Through the open door Maria could see rows and rows of green vats, about eighteen. Each had the body of the same man floating inside at various stages of growth.
Sitting at the computer terminal was a man who looked to be of Indian descent. He smiled at her. “Dr. Arena,” he said. “Please forgive your rough treatment in your travels and be welcomed to Luna. Can I get you a beverage of some sort?”
Maria stared at him. “What I’d really like is a hand massage and directions to the nearest shuttle port. Can that be arranged?”
The man nodded to the redheaded man who had escorted her in. He beamed at her, took Maria’s right hand, and began to gently massage it. His partner stood by the door, her arms crossed.
“The other request we can take care of later,” the man said. “My name is Mayur Sibal, and I am a doctor of dupliactrics here on Luna. Until recently I was head of the most prestigious cloning lab on the moon.”
Recently. Maria began to get a sinking feeling in her stomach. That’s not to say she had been optimistic about her situation, but she had held on to some hope that someone wanted a job done that she would have done anyway, had they actually asked her or something. But “recently”—that wasn’t a good sign.
“Recently” the clones had revolted on Earth, and then revolted on the moon as anti-cloning fanatics fanned the flames. Clones had disappeared and not been rewoken—assassinations, if the same rules applied to clones as they did humans. Which it looked more and more likely that they wouldn’t.
Maria didn’t say anything as she puzzled this out. Dr. Sibal waited a moment and then continued. “I have a job for you.”
“Most people who I work with are less forceful with their requests,” Maria said, raising an eyebrow. “What do you want me for?”
In answer, Dr. Sibal turned to the computer screen and pushed a button. The image of a tall, white-haired young man appeared. He knelt on the floor, muttering prayers with his hand on a book.
“You may have heard of Father Gunter Orman,” Sibal said. “A most unpleasant man, violently opposed to our cause. We have intel that he was about to endorse clone hunting. Genocide.”
Maria winced. She didn’t fear death, but being hunted…that was something altogether different. And “genocide” implied that he would also be working to ensure the clones would not to return to their bodies.
Before Maria had gone the route of illegal hacking, she had done a stint writing code to keep out hackers like her, but also hackers seeking to sabotage the precious computer backups of their personalities. She knew the threats out there were more than psychic danger.
“I’ve heard of him,” she said. She pulled her hand out of the man’s grasp—gently, so he wouldn’t think she was trying to get away—and handed him her other numb hand. He didn’t even look at her, but went to work coaxing life back into that limb.
“We got him. We were trying to bring him around to our thinking the peaceful way, and when he wouldn’t listen, we tried the non-peaceful way.”
Maria kept her face calm, determined to show them no reaction.
“Then,” Sibal continued, “we cloned him and killed the original. We hoped that having him see that we’re the same after cloning would get him on our side.”
“And that didn’t work either,” Maria guessed drily. “Else you wouldn’t need me.”
Dr. Sibal smiled and rubbed his hands together. “You are quick to learn. That’s exactly it. We need to hack his personality and remove the hatred of clones, indeed, the hatred of who he is. We are attempting to encourage him to embrace his new family and understand we are not monsters.”
Too late for that, Maria very pointedly did not say.
“And if I refuse?” she asked.
The man massaging her hand grasped her pinkie in his fist and twisted it viciously. Maria heard the snap a moment before the pain enveloped her arm. She yelled and jerked her hand back, cradling it against her chest.
“You could have just said something! I might have responded to a threat!”
Sibal had lost his thin smile. “You need to know we are serious. If you do this for us, we will let you go.”
Maria wanted to know why they would trust her to do a good job instead of putting this poor man out of his misery by destroying his mindmap, but she could guess. Her hand throbbed horribly, and she didn’t look down at her twisted left pinkie.
“Sold,” she said, hating how small her voice sounded.
It was a matter of child’s play to strip the base hatred of clones from the priest, but she wanted to look back farther and see if she could identify the triggering effect that started the hatred. Searching a personality matrix was tedious, but always a fascinating puzzle.
Her captors, however, weren’t interested in her finesse.
“My employer needs that personality ready in a week,” Dr. Sibal said, looking over her shoulder.
“If you want him to act as if he’s on your side all the time, you have to let me do my job the way I do it,” Maria said, not looking over her shoulder. “You hired me for a reason, and that probably wasn’t to do a hatchet job on this matrix. You don’t tell a brain surgeon to hurry up with the scalpel, do you?”
“When the entirety of the clone future rides on it, I do,” he said in her ear. Her back stiffen
ed but she kept carefully searching the mindmap and making notes.
“Threats will also slow me down, Doctor,” she said.
“I don’t threaten, Ms. Arena,” he said, tapping her broken finger with maybe more force than was needed.
He left the room, but Maria had gotten the clue. Get the damn hacking done, or they take another finger, or my whole body. She had been on Luna for one week now and hadn’t done a mindmap for herself. In another week she would be counted as missing on Earth. In seven years she might be declared legally dead and woken up, wondering what the hell had happened. Unless the laws changed again.
She sat back and rubbed her eyes. She had yet to find the moment in Father Orman’s life that put in his hatred of clones. Her pinkie throbbed. It hadn’t been set, and was busy healing itself at an awkward angle. She wondered if it would have to be rebroken. If she survived this.
Orman had been a devout Catholic. Faith had a special color that tinged experiences. Maria was no longer religious—clones weren’t welcome in many churches, but many kept the rituals of their childhood—but she had seen enough mindmaps to distinguish the true faithful from those going through the motions out of habit, fear, or greed. Father Orman was the real deal. The light green of faith was all over his mindmap, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker. His faith when he was kidnapped was being tested, he had felt.
She had stopped feeling guilty about reading personal mindmaps a long time ago. It was like looking at people in the bathroom: Everyone was horrified at the thought of someone seeing them on the can, and yet almost no one got any thrill looking at that. If you had to watch someone on the can, it was probably for an important reason and the fact that they were there on the can was a side issue. Maria no longer judged the little sins, the thefts, the lies, and the little hurts that didn’t amount to anything in the long run of anyone’s life. She held a lot of power here; she wasn’t going to misuse it.
The next day, Dr. Sibal had his redheaded goon break her foot. He gave her strong painkillers so she could code, and the pain receded into a distant bother, the code becoming gently drifting data that was sometimes hard to hold down.