The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!

by Lake, Jay

How hard can it be to access the file of a blend-head? When they’re whirled, they hardly know their keypad from their mouse.. .or care enough to figure out which is which.

  Cyber had probably thought he could keep the entire rescue fee by eliminating his undergeeks—even though I was his best software operative. Probably the need to try and think like a blender was what did him in. Cyber’s way of thinking could be too linear, too systematic. And never mind the crap about female brains...

  * * * *

  Once the secrets of her unique design, her detailed plans for the instrumentation of her efforts, became known, that they would be exploited was, perhaps, an inevitable given. Perhaps it was even her ulterior motive behind the whole project...although the effects of her blender days make all speculation about what she was really thinking, what she really meant, quite open to outside interpretation.

  Perhaps it was the how of it all, what she did to simultaneously hide and expose her creation, that was her ultimate goal. That the how itself became so important, so crucial to such a non-artistic aspect of everyday life, may or may not have been a mere fortuity.

  If it wasn’t, so much the better. But if it was, it was beyond ironic—

  * * * *

  Wishing that Cyber had stuck around long enough to help me lift up the computer onto the spare desk I keep cleared just for cases like this (the ones when I can take the customer’s PC home with me, if the problem can’t be fixed any other way), I finished the last of the connections between the client’s PC, my monitor, my PC, and then plugged all the assorted power cords into my most powerful surge suppressor—the one with the $80,000 insurance protection guaranteed. I’d also plugged in a BC-LAN standby system, just in case. The latter had $30K insurance protection.

  If the clients had already shelled out $1500 just to let Cyber fruitlessly pour over the outer matryoshki with nothing to show for his hacking but a bill, I owed them some protection.

  Before turning on the suppressor, I unwrapped two pieces of candy, shoved them past my cracked lips, then—silently praying to Gates, god of all nerds—flipped the switch with a toe before turning on each of the units in turn.

  I had a visual relational database in place in my PC, ready to make those elusive, random connections between seemingly unrelated data, plus handle whatever windows, images, or buried data might be in store—but once I used the cybermouse attached to my right forefinger to point out the menu command ACCESS ADDITIONAL HARD DRIVE, what overtook my monitor was enough to make me whole-swallow one of my candies—hard and painfully:

  WHERE DO YOU HURT?

  WHY DO YOU HURT?

  RESPONSE REQUIRED BEFORE MENU WILL ADVANCE ■

  Wondering between sputtering coughs whether Cyber had had to hack the hard drive to extract that much, I found myself typing on impulse:

  My damned throat hurts.

  Because your stupid Russian-nesting-doll program scared the crap out of me, that’s why.

  As the period after the last “y” flickered onto the monitor—which virtually cleared as I’d keyed in the first word, save for the random crossword-like grid of nonsense Japanese and that corner window filled with the two small grids and the...whatever that was supposed to be above them (an icon? a smiley? on second glance, it vaguely resembled one of those Hopi wooden dolls, the sacred ones)—the screen was overtaken by this admonishment:

  RESPONSE NOT SUFFICIENT; INPUT AGAIN

  RESPONSE NOT GERMANE; INPUT AGAIN

  “Cyber, you miserable little dweeb,” I hissed as I leaned over to my fax machine, grabbed a sheet of paper, and scrawled “Why didn’t you TELL me it was encrypted? And what is with the grids and Mr. Happy-Dance above them? What the hell kind of a blender wrote this file?”

  I didn’t bother to sign it. Once I’d dialed his number and fed the message in, I ripped the clear cellophane off the next two candies and popped them into my mouth, then tried to get the first screen of the program back on the monitor. It wouldn’t budge; a very rigidly sequential program—Cyber must’ve forgotten the questions before he bottomed out.

  “Okay, okay, where and why, where and why,” I mumbled around the slick globules of hard candy whose flavor I couldn’t even distinguish—the inside of my mouth was too bitter with coughed-up bile—and typed:

  My feelings are hurt because my boss lied to me.

  It hurts because he messed with me.

  I was rewarded with two RESPONSE NOT GERMANE; INPUT AGAINs. Nothing else onscreen changed; I tried using my cybermouse to see if there was some way to make the new block of garbled information either clear up or at least turn right-side up (how anyone had keyed in data upside down was beyond even my understanding—perhaps it was a quirk of the polymer drive), but nothing happened. I knew that the Vapor wasn’t known to spontaneously delete material, so the gaps between the fragments of words had to begin as empty spaces. Which meant that whatever was to be revealed was waiting deeper in the program’s “nest.” Had the woman who’d programmed ’ this deliberately left the word “GRID” whole, or was it part of another word?

  The beep of an incoming fax made me crunch down hard on my melting candies; deep in my mouth, I thought I felt a well-filled tooth wobble. And when I read what Cyber had printed (his old dot-matrix printer, the one he saved for personal, not geek, messages), I bit down hard enough on what was left of my candy to really move that sore tooth of mine:

  You didn’t rend the stuff in the envelope, did you? Once you do, a couple of tips: 1) using an automated immune system on the Vapor virus won’t help—Vapor is immune to capture, but it doesn’t seem to be the main problem here, and 2) I don’t think our girl was seeking information about temporary sources of pain.

  Before you try again, a word of warning about the matryoshki: the other problem with it (aside from being prone to viral attack) is the way the data in the outer “layers” deteriorates after too many fruitless assaults. See theway the grid on the “input again” screen is out of exact horizontal line?

  It was perfectly straight the first ten times I tried to hack in. I don’t know if the deterioration is confined to the outer file only, or if it cuts into the entire file.

  So—hide your damned bowl of candy, lock the fridge, and READ THE DAMNED FILE! You do have a staple puller, right? If not, use your teeth!

  CYBE

  I spat out a brightly colored wad of masticated candy fragments, silvery filling material, and a few dots of spittle-ringed blood onto my palm; I tried but couldn’t wad up the paper in my other hand.

  Another thing he’d neglected to tell me— the matryoshki had a death wish. Another obstacle...albeit a most fragile one, which could be so easily rent and shredded, leaving only a scramble of Oriental babble and two meaningless little number-squares on screen.

  Plus a tiny surmounting figure whose function would forever remain unknown—

  “Oh damn!” Cyber’s abrupt wake-up knock hadn’t left me so fully awake after all. E-mailing him would be quicker, but I didn’t want to risk a crash while my PC was connected to hers, so I scrawled out another fax: “Cybe, can I save a matryoshki/polymer drive file on my PC or do I need a poly-drive PC? And no, I have not read the file yet—does it contain anything TRULY usable? I’m assuming you read it, after all...”

  Probing my broken tooth with the tip of my tongue, I decided to go for some softer stuff while waiting for him to return the fax—yogurt came in candy-like flavors, didn’t it?

  I was just beginning to worry about possible burn-in after that last garbled portion of the file had been on-screen for over half an hour when my machine beeped:

  Poly-drives and/or matryoshki files can’t be downloaded unless all banks of each file have been read, in turn. And to do that you’ll need a polymer drive PC, if you can find one. Put out a posting on the manufacturer’s web site, but the waiting list for
surplus units is way long. New units are paid for in advance: banks, hospitals, etc. Until I get word, READ THE FILE ALREADY—you can read and eat at the same time, can’t you?

  C.

  Whispering “Where do I hurt? All right, whoever the hell you are, I’ll tell you,” I mashed down the caps lock key (I didn’t think the file could really tell if I was shouting or not) and began typing:

  I HURT IN EVERY OVERFED, HUNGRY CELL IN MY WHOLE SAGGING BODY. I HURT BECAUSE I’M FEEDING AN APPETITE THAT KEEPS SCREAMING “FEED ME, FEED ME, FEED ME” LIKE SOME INSANE LEWIS CARROLL CHARACTER STUCK INSIDE ME, A CRAVING FOR MORE AND MORE AND EVEN MORE EVEN WHEN I AM SO PHYSICALLY FULL I HAVE TO SPIT UP OR THROW UP WHAT’S GONE DOWN MY THROAT. AND THE HURT OF THIS EMPTINESS BURNS DEEPER THAN BILE, AND LINGERS LONGER THAN THE ACHE IN MY THROAT AND RIBS AFTER I’M DONE, ONLY THE HURT IS SO INSISTENT, IT CLAMORS FOR NEW FOOD ONCE THE OLD IS GONE. I HURT BECAUSE THE NEED OF IT GOES DEEPER THAN THE MERE NEED FOR SUSTENANCE, THE COMMON NEED FOR NOURISHMENT. IT HURTS TO KNOW THAT MY BODY IS A STOCKPILE OF FUEL SURROUNDING A FURNACE WHOSE PILOT LIGHT HAS BEEN LONG EXTINGUISHED.

  AND SO I HURT BECAUSE ■

  The pulsing square of pixels that rested at the end of the last word I’d typed mocked me, yet I couldn’t find the words to continue—if they were within me, they were buried by slabs of my own corpulence. Smothered from within...

  RESPONSE ACCEPTED

  RESPONSE NOT COMPLETE; INPUT ADDITIONAL DATA

  ADDITIONAL RESPONSE REQUIRED

  ...And sorrow like

  to go, and sorrow

  returning...

  ...Ah, you know dreary

  North

  With Rihaku’s forgotten,

  And guardsmen fed the

  Li Po,

  “Lament Frontier

  I don’t know what was worse, realizing that I’d lost the mangled block of what I now supposed might’ve been instructions pertaining to those two small grids, or seeing the word “sorrow” repeated twice in that fragment of what probably was a poem. Bad enough that I’d been told that the owner of the PC was a blender: taking blend was considered risky at best, but to be aware of that even as one was hooked on it...

  Leaning back in my chair, I asked the little totem-icon-smiley-pseudo-kachina figure that surmounted the two grids, “Are you Li Po or Rihaku? Or none of the above?”

  The tiny icon wavered mute on my screen, one “arm” up (yea?), one “arm” pointing down (nay?).

  “Or does Simon say go read what’s in that damned envelope?”

  G-Q-D Man guarded his secrets in silence...

  2

  If whoever printed up the off-line newspaper and magazine articles had bothered to rip off the carrier strips, the contents of the battered Tyvek envelope might not have seemed so bulky.

  The first article (or at least what Cyber had placed on top of the small sheaf of papers) was pulled from JAMA, an issue from a couple of years back. Jargon-heavy, it concerned an illness called primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH), which was basically a combination lung disease/high blood pressure malady, formerly considered near-fatal or fatal, that constricted blood vessels in the lungs, generating fatigue, shortness of breath, and

  possible cardiac arrest. The gist of the article—as I understood it—was that while this disease used to be treated either by lung transplants or drugs like digitalis or prostacyclin with varying degrees of success, the prognosis for PPH patients treated with a gene therapy involving the infusion of bone marrow injected with the missing chromosome whose absence had been found to cause PPH in the first place was much better. The least-successful cases had a 75% survival rate while also continuing drug therapy, while the “cures” (60% of all patients treated in the 2014 study) were not only able to stop taking medication, but their pulmonary arteries and damaged blood vessels were either healed or returned to a near-normal state.

  The next part was difficult to read—Cyber had used an ink marker to highlight the section, and the yellow pigment had done strange things to the recycled paper beneath it—but according to the article, an unforeseen side effect had begun to appear in some of the “cured” PPH patients: in order to insure that the marrow transplants would be successful, the patients had to undergo a form of chemotherapy, mostly antirejection drugs for the marrow transplants, and, from what I could understand of the medical double-speak I was reading, these anti-rejection drugs had affected the brain chemistry of these patients to the point where serious personality changes began to manifest themselves. The specifics were vague, but the implication wasn’t: something happened in the heads of these people. Something that shouldn’t have occurred, but did.

  There was a chart showing what sorts of changes had been observed in the PPH study participants: a tendency toward reckless behavior (itself a genetic problem), addiction, paranoid behavior, aggression, passivity—nothing that might not have occurred anyhow, during the course of any person’s lifetime, but the writer of the article (a specialist in some field I didn’t even realize existed) suggested that further study was warranted before gene therapy be continued for PPH patients. A rebuttal article followed, written by another medically obscure specialist who stressed the randomness of the “cured” patients’ symptoms, and the likelihood that these patients could’ve been bom with a predisposition for these physical/psychological maladies...

  Cyber didn’t highlight anything in the second article.

  The next hard copy was from the obituaries of the New York Times. A woman named Liane Bertrand, the “artist daughter of renowned sculptor Marian Bertrand and her lawyer-husband Pascal,” had died of unspecified causes on October 4 of last year, about two weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday.

  Which made her roughly four years younger than I was.

  While she’d earned a BFA from Stanford back in 2015, curiously nothing else was noted about her. There was plenty written about her mother’s large industrial-graphic sculptures, including the well-known sign/optical sculpture for Genius Productions Ltd. out in L.A., the recording studio run by that music producer-cum-freak Edan

  Westmisley. There was an aside that Liane had “assisted” her mother in the installation of some of the latter’s most recent works. Nothing one would really need a BFA for—anyone with a blowtorch and a power screwdriver could’ve helped assemble those things.

  A photo accompanied the obit; it hadn’t downloaded well. The image could’ve been any young woman, rendered in soot and smog.

  Under the official obit was an article torn from one of the tabloids (which still appeared in hard copy, probably the last of the “real” newspapers left in circulation anymore), and the title more than filled in what the Times obit had carefully avoided: “Bertrands Blame Originators of ‘Blend’ Recipe for Daughter’s Suicide.”

  No cautious circumvention of the facts here, no emphasis on her mother’s accomplishments... just what had been missing from that “official” death notice: who Liane Bertrand was, and what she’d been up to between her college graduation and her death. Born in Beijing, she’d been adopted by her wealthy, middle-aged parents when eighteen months old; the Bertrands, active in UNICEF, had found her during a routine visit to China’s much-improved State-run orphanages. They didn’t know she had PPH until she was thirteen; before that, she was an average Chinese-American girl—art and dance lessons with her peers, sleepovers with friends. Liane had been well-liked; her death generated little but positive comments from anonymous “family friends” who’d agreed to help the tabloid compile the article by offering up their memories of her.

  (Cyber had scribbled in the margin: “Must’ve been a decent one; if Anonymous hates you, you’re screwed.”)

  But after she was diagnosed with PPH, all her talent and all the good-wishes of her family and friends couldn’t change the inevitable: Liane Bertrand was almost cer
tainly doomed to an early, painful death. Ironically, there was little if anything modem medicine could offer her in the way of comfort—she was physically unable to tolerate either the now commonly used prostacyclin or the more traditional digitalis therapy. Yet she still tried to study via computer for her degree, despite being bedridden and nearly helpless.

  And while a lung transplant might’ve seemed a likely option, it was—ironically—yet another dead end. Such treatment was also impossible—when she was young, a routine tonsillectomy revealed her inability to tolerate anesthesia. And while acupuncture anesthesia was already common by then, no doctor would recommend it for something as lengthy as a lung transplant. But it was a viable option for use during a bone marrow transplant...

  She was one of the 60% “cured” during the study later detailed in JAMA. And, likewise, one of the people whose resulting maladies of the brain made up the statistics in that chart.

  Blend (“the street name for a drug whose actual ‘ingredients’ vary widely from hit to hit— cocaine, aspirin, PCP, MDMA, marijuana, codeine, over-the-counter cold, flu, and pain/sleep aids, cooking spray, correction fluid, and even substances marketed as plant food—and that is created, literally, in a common kitchen blender, before the mixed recipe, as the resulting mixture is called, is dried then finely ground into a crude powder that can be inhaled, injected after being mixed with water, or poured into capsules and ingested,” according to the article’s side-bar) was beginning to make its insidious crawl from university dorms (where it was initially “discovered” by some medical students) to the inner city to suburbia right around the time Liane was first diagnosed with PPH. All that was necessary for anyone to make it was a small amount of whatever drug you could score cheaply, plus something more easily obtained in the drugstore or supermarket to intensify the kick. Add in a binder (water or liquor, plus cornstarch or powdered sugar) to give it a smoother post-blend consistency, then buy or borrow a multi-speed blender, and after a couple of hours of continuous highspeed mixing, you were set. Dry what poured out in an oven or microwave, grind it in a food processor or (for the die-hard purists) with a mortar, and then get set to have your brain not only scrambled, but digested and excreted in the process. If you lived long enough to remember what you’d done, let alone the high it produced.