Active Memory

by Dan Wells

  “Maybe we don’t have to,” said Sahara. “What’d you girls find out about the creepy supermodel? Please tell me you have so many clues we don’t have to ever think about this guy’s djinni ever again.”

  “Pretty dang close,” said Anja. She looked at Fang and Jaya. “Who wants to go first?”

  “I will,” said Jaya. She worked internal tech support for Johara, the largest telecom company in the world, so if she bent a rule here or there, she could access some pretty impressive things. “You’re going to love this: so I ran her name and face through every recognition database I could access, and I found her. Ramira Bennett is an employee for—drumroll, please—ZooMorrow.”

  Marisa’s eyes went wide. “ZooMorrow? Like, the gengineering company?”

  “Exactly,” said Jaya. “Have you ever seen a MyDragon?”

  “Franca Maldonado has one,” said Sahara. “ZooMorrow makes them?”

  Jaya nodded. “Along with the HugMonkey, the SaniDog, and the Riddler.”

  “What’s a Riddler?” asked Fang.

  “It’s a cat with wings,” said Sahara. “I guess MySphinx was too hard to pronounce.”

  “Or it just sounds too much like MySphincter,” said Anja.

  “Gross,” said Sahara.

  “Isn’t anyone going to make a joke about what my sphincter sounds like?” asked Anja. “I set you right up for it. It was perfect!”

  “The models I listed are just their retail chimeras,” said Jaya. “They have a whole industrial line, too, including a Ferrat—that’s a rodent that’s been gengineered to eat scrap metal—and something called a Plumber’s Helper, which is kind of a snake-ish weasel thing that goes into toilet pipes and eats through clogs.”

  “That’s revolting,” said Marisa.

  “Now can someone make a MySphincter joke?” asked Anja.

  “I think I need a HugMonkey,” said Fang with a grimace.

  “The point,” said Jaya, “is that ZooMorrow is a gengineering superstar—they do chimeras, human genhancements, the whole nine yards. Medical tech, fast-healing gene therapies, replacement organs, you name it, and they’re literally on top of the industry, worldwide.”

  “Yay America,” said Sahara.

  “So Bennett works for them,” said Marisa. “What does she do for them?”

  “That’s where it gets weird,” said Jaya. “Her name and face show up all over the world, maybe five or six times a year, but only in police stations. Nowhere else—maybe on the streets, because there’s no way I can search every storefront in every city, but in big buildings like hotels and office buildings there’s nothing. Not even in airports. Johara hosts a facial recognition system called Aankh, which most of the big airlines use to track passengers, and she’s not even in there—not her face, not her ID, nothing.”

  “So she travels around,” said Marisa, “apparently in a private jet, going from police station to police station, just . . . what, confiscating evidence? Is ZooMorrow covering up crimes?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Anja. “You remember statute Whatever-the-Hell?”

  “That’s my favorite statute,” said Fang.

  “It was in Mari’s recording: federal statute 7o.3482,” said Anja. “It’s a law that governs intellectual property and proprietary technology. Which would only make sense—”

  “If the hand was genetically modified,” said Marisa eagerly. “If Zenaida had had some kind of gene therapy or genhancement, on her skin or her blood or whatever, then her arm would contain technology created by a gengineering company. But . . .” She paused. “Plenty of people have genhancements—way more than five or six a year. And I’ve looked up gengineering stuff before, back when we were thinking of buying me a biological arm instead of another cybernetic one, and the rights document they make you sign definitely doesn’t give them ownership of your body. So how do they have the right to claim Zenaida’s hand after she dies?”

  “It’s the proprietary part,” said Anja. “If Zenaida had a genhancement that contained some kind of secret technology that hasn’t been released yet, then they can claim the right to protect it as a trade secret—even if that secret shows up in an unrelated criminal case, like this one.”

  Marisa shook her head. “But why would a random woman in Mirador have proprietary gene tech? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “She’s rich,” said Anja, whose family was also wealthy. “Rich people have all kinds of stuff we’re not supposed to.”

  “Even if this is true,” said Marisa, “it doesn’t answer any of our questions. What happened the day of the accident, and what do I have to do with it?”

  Sahara looked at her, scrunching her face into a frustrated grimace, and then shrugged. “Maybe you’re a horrible freak of nature, grown in a lab with spliced-in DNA from a dozen different animals.”

  “Thanks,” said Marisa.

  “Have you tried eating a toilet clog?” asked Anja. “That would answer the question pretty quick.”

  Marisa blinked on the virtual reality’s interface menu, asked it for a snowball, and then threw it in Anja’s face. Anja staggered back, laughing, and the snow crystals disappeared into nothing.

  “I think we’ve made some very good progress so far,” said Fang, getting back to business. “Are you ready to be super confused now?”

  “Oh boy,” said Sahara. “What is it?”

  “You’re going to love it,” said Jaya.

  Fang smiled. “While Jaya was running the video of Bennett’s face through recognition programs, I was deconstructing it in a virtual reality program.”

  “Why?” asked Sahara.

  “Because I was bored, and she’s super intimidating, so I thought she’d be perfect as a new Overworld avatar. But here’s the thing: once I got in there, trying to re-create her face in VR, it turned out to be super easy because it’s already VR. Or a hologram, technically, which is just real-world VR anyway.”

  “She’s a hologram?” asked Sahara.

  “Not all of her,” said Fang. “Just her face. She probably had projectors built into her collar, or maybe just embedded right into her head, like Anja’s cybernetic eye.” Fang grinned. “So the beautiful face we all saw was completely fake.”

  “I couldn’t tell a thing,” said Marisa. “I was right there, just a few feet away from her, and I couldn’t spot a thing.”

  “That must be one hell of an expensive holoprojector,” said Sahara.

  “No kidding,” said Fang. “Lots of celebrities use holomasks when they go out in public, but you can usually tell it’s a mask. We use them all the time in Beijing for festivals and stuff. But one that looks this realistic has got to be state of the art.”

  “So ZooMorrow has proprietary gene tech and cutting-edge holotech,” said Anja. “How can they afford all that?”

  “By protecting their tech with aggressive, hidden operatives,” said Sahara. “We don’t know how their genetic stuff got into Zenaida, but it did, and then when the police ran a DNA test to identify her body it tripped some alert, and out comes Hottie McGorgeousFace to get it back under control.”

  “So what’s under the mask?” asked Marisa.

  “Her real face,” said Jaya. “Which for all we know no one ever sees. We know this mask, at least, is the one she uses for police, but she might have a dozen different ones, and the IDs to go with them. She could be a different person everywhere she goes. Solves the mystery of why she only pops up on the grid a few times a year.”

  “I’ve got a pretty cool theory,” said Anja.

  Sahara sighed. “Is it ridiculous?”

  “More or less ridiculous than a faceless superspy stealing severed hands for a toilet-munching-weasel company?” asked Anja.

  “I concede the point,” said Sahara. “Whaddaya got?”

  “What if Ramira Bennett is Zenaida de Maldonado?”

  Marisa narrowed her eyes. “That . . . doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I didn’t say it made sense,” said Anja, “I said it wa
s cool.”

  “We have a lot to think about,” said Sahara. “What we don’t have is anywhere to go next. How would we even follow up on Ramira Bennett? Contact ZooMorrow directly? They wouldn’t tell us anything.”

  “We could try to hack their private servers,” said Fang.

  “And maybe we will,” said Sahara, “but that’s going to take weeks, and we have to move on this sooner than that. I hate to say this, but . . .” She looked at Marisa and tapped the 3D simulation of Memo’s djinni. “You’re going to have to open this up.”

  SIX

  “Olaya,” said Marisa, sitting at her desk, “lock my door.”

  She heard a click, and then Olaya, the house computer, responded in her calm, disembodied voice: “Your door is locked. Would you like me to dim the lights?”

  “No thanks,” said Marisa, “I’m not going to sleep yet—but I need everyone to think I am, so fudge the data for me, okay?”

  “I do not fudge data,” said Olaya.

  “Ugh,” said Marisa, “I forgot to load your sidekick hacks. Olaya, run subroutine GooeyFudge.”

  Olaya could converse, but she wasn’t a true AI—she wasn’t a self-aware entity, just an interface that made using the house computer easier. And that meant she could be altered by anyone with coding expertise and sufficient access. Marisa had both. The voice was silent for a moment, then spoke again: “The data has been fudged. Don’t forget to put a towel at the bottom of your door.”

  “Right,” said Marisa, and jumped up from her seat. “Thanks.” She always forgot the towel, so she’d added that reminder as part of her hack. Olaya was supposed to help run the home, keeping track of schedules and meals and such, but she could also tap into each family member’s djinni data to report where they were, how they were, and what they were probably doing. Marisa had almost immediately suborned this feature: when GooeyFudge was running, Olaya would report that Marisa was in her bed, and that her heart rate and breathing were consistent with that of a person who was fast asleep. She gave Marisa the freedom to stay up and work in private, but unless she remembered to cover the base of her door with a towel, light would shine out under it and give her away. Some parts of hacking, she had learned, were surprisingly low-tech.

  With her room safely secured, she walked back to her desk and sat down. Stacks of computers and banks of screens and tangled webs of cords and cables filled most of it, and almost the entire wall beyond, but in the center sat the new project: old homework printouts covered the surface to keep it clean, and on them sat the plastic container with a crime lord’s bloody, digital brain. She made a face, and then popped it open. The lid came off with a slight sucking sound, and the djinni implant glistened in the light. She reached over and clicked on another lamp, shining an even brighter light on the gory object.

  “I am detecting blood particles in the air,” said Olaya. “Are you injured?”

  “No!” said Marisa, and then said it again more softly, glancing at the door. “No, I’m fine, don’t do anything. And don’t tell anyone.”

  “I will not,” said Olaya.

  “Did you already tell someone?”

  “I have not.”

  Marisa blew out a low whistle as she looked at the djinni. “Okay. Let’s kill the antenna first.”

  The biggest obstacle to looking at the djinni was the one that Memo had been most afraid of: if she activated it and it connected to the internet, anyone who was looking could find its location and come straight to her doorstep. She was not in the mood to meet anyone who was actively looking for a gangster, least of all the police, so she had to start it up in a way that kept it inert and isolated. Memo had a Ganika 5 djinni, one of the most popular models, in part because they used the body itself as a signal booster—your entire skeleton basically became a secondary antenna, with the Wi-Fi and satellite signals resonating through the bones, which gave better service than a regular antenna and made more room for other hardware in the implant itself. On the other hand, it left the djinni’s connectivity very easy to compromise. Marisa needed to disable only one tiny auxiliary antenna before she turned it on. She pulled on some plastic gloves, and with a tweezer in one hand and a tiny screwdriver in the other, she got to work.

  Her phone rang suddenly, and she almost screamed in surprise.

  “I’m sorry,” said Olaya. “I didn’t understand that. Could you repeat it?”

  “It’s nothing,” said Marisa. The phone icon in her vision was bouncing, and the audio alert rang out again. “It’s just my phone.” She blinked to dismiss it, then paused. The call hadn’t been given a custom icon, which meant it wasn’t from any of her friends or family. Who else would be calling her this late? “Olaya, what time is it?”

  “Eleven oh three p.m.,” said Olaya. “Is your djinni clock malfunctioning?”

  “No,” said Marisa, “it says the same thing.”

  The audio alert sounded again, and the icon returned. She looked at it more closely this time, reading the name.

  It was Omar.

  Marisa looked at her hands, and the bloody djinni she was working on. Omar hadn’t called her in years—he talked to her in public, but usually it was just a jibe or a snide remark. Their chat at the police station the day before had been the longest conversation she’d had with him in ages. What did he want?

  The phone rang again, and she blinked to answer it.

  “Omar?”

  “Marisa,” he said. He spoke slowly. “I’m . . . sorry to bother you.”

  “Did something happen?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, no. I don’t have news from the police or my father or anything. And none of them are talking to me, so you probably know more than I do.”

  Marisa frowned, confused. “So . . . what happened?”

  Omar didn’t respond, and all she heard were shallow breaths, like he’d been running.

  “Omar, are you okay?”

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  “Who? Your mom? We don’t know that—”

  “She’s dead,” he said again, “and it’s not because of the hand. You can lose a hand and live through it—not that I need to tell you that. But now she’s dead for sure.”

  “You—” She had too many questions, and not enough time to put her thoughts in order. “You haven’t heard from the police, so who have you heard from? You—” She stopped again, a terrifying possibility rearing up in her mind. “Did you find her?”

  “No,” he said. “Yes, sort of. Marisa, she’s . . .” He trailed off, and again she heard only ragged breathing. Whatever he was trying to say, it scared him.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You can tell me.”

  “I saw . . . ,” said Omar. “I saw her . . . ghost.”

  What? “Her ‘ghost’?”

  “I know it sounds crazy,” he said. “You have to believe me.”

  “But what—”

  “I saw her again,” he said. “Like in my dream. The same dream, really, but I wasn’t asleep this time. I was here in my house, and I was awake, and suddenly she was here, looking at me and running down the hallway, and she was terrified. Of me. She kept looking over her shoulder, and trying to run away, and she got to the end of the hall and ran straight through the wall and she was gone. I called you because . . . because you know about the dream. And because I don’t have anyone else I can talk to.”

  Omar had a father, and almost as many siblings as Marisa did, and a private army of housekeepers and cooks and gardeners and guards, and of course the whole group of Maldonado enforcers that patrolled Mirador and did everything Omar told them. And yet he didn’t have anyone to talk to.

  “Ghosts,” she started, and then stopped. Was this really the best thing to start with, in this situation? “Even if you saw a . . . ghost, I don’t know that it means for sure that she’s dead.”

  “Why? Because ghosts aren’t real?”

  “Um, yeah?”

  “We have spirits,” he said, “and they have to go som
ewhere. People have been seeing them for centuries. Some of the most popular vidcasts in the world are about ghost hunters.”

  “That doesn’t mean your mom is a ghost.”

  “Why not?” His voice was a fragile mix of anger and pain. “Why are the ghosts they see real, but my mom’s isn’t?”

  “Omar,” she said, and stopped again. Arguing wasn’t helping. “You had a bad dream,” she said, “and now you’re exhausted and you were half asleep and you had the same dream again. And that sucks, because it’s a rotten dream, and I’m sorry you keep having it—”

  “My mom is not a nightmare.”

  “Your mom is a . . .” She searched for the right word. “A mystery. And your brain is trying to solve it.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” he snapped. “I’m not a child.”

  “It’s not just you,” said Marisa. “I haven’t seen any ghosts, but I’m having plenty of bad dreams too, awake and asleep, and it’s all I can think about.” She looked at the bloody djinni. “And I’m trying to solve it, just like you. I’m going to find her, or find out what happened to her.”

  His voice was a sneer. “Marisa to the rescue.”

  “Why did you call me?” she demanded. “Why try to talk to me if you don’t want to hear anything I have to say?”

  “I don’t know,” he snapped back. “Maybe I just—”

  He fell silent, and Marisa stewed in her thoughts, angry and sympathetic at the same time. He’d called her because he had no one else to call; he’d already said that. But he was still Omar, and acting like a blowhole was second nature.

  “I only remember one time with her,” he said softly. “I was three when she . . . left. I was here in the house, outside in the garden, and I was helping her plant flowers. I asked my father later, and he said that she loved working in the garden and always did it herself—the gardener maintained it, but she planned it and planted it and one time I helped. Maybe more, I guess, but I only remember the one.”

  He trailed off, and she asked a question to keep him going. “What were you planting?”