Active Memory

by Dan Wells

He laughed again, with slightly more life in it than before. “I barely know the names of those flowers today; I definitely didn’t know them when I was three.”

  “Red? Blue?”

  “Maybe orange?” he said. “I don’t know; they were small, kind of low to the ground. I guess that’s why she let a three-year-old help with them.”

  Marisa smiled. “What else did your mother do? Did she have a job?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I don’t know what. Dad never talks about her, so I don’t know what her degree was in. She might have done accounting or marketing or some kind of science. It was a science company, but that doesn’t mean—”

  Marisa sat up straight, at full and sudden attention. “Which science company?”

  “Erm, why?” said Omar.

  “Just tell me the name,” she said.

  “It was ZooMorrow,” said Omar. “The MyDragon guys. Why?”

  Marisa shook her head in disbelief, and then laughed out loud. “You’re not going to believe this. You know that woman in the black suit? The one who took your mom’s hand?”

  “How am I going to forget her?”

  “We looked her up,” said Marisa. “She works for ZooMorrow, too.”

  Omar spluttered for a moment, then finally got a word out. “What?”

  “Right?” she asked. “This can’t be a coincidence.”

  “What else do you know about her?”

  “Nothing,” said Marisa. “She’s practically a . . . well, a ghost—no pun intended, or whatever. We don’t even know what she looks like, because that supermodel face was a holomask.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “Marisa to the rescue,” she said.

  “We need to know more,” said Omar. “Why did she want the hand? Why did she even have a claim on it?”

  “We found that out, too,” said Marisa. “That statute she cited is about proprietary technology. Your mom’s body probably contained some kind of unreleased genetic augmentation, which tripped a flag when the police did their blood test. Did your mom have any genhancements?”

  “Not as far as I know,” said Omar.

  “But your dad would know.”

  “I told you, he never talks about her.”

  “But he told you about the ZooMorrow thing,” said Marisa. “Obviously he talks about her sometimes.”

  “But he doesn’t like to,” said Omar. “Just superficial stuff, like how beautiful she was—everything else I know about her comes from late night rants when he’s too drunk to stop himself.”

  Marisa raised her eyebrow. “So maybe we need to get him drunk.”

  “You don’t want to see my father drunk,” said Omar. “Even if we could guarantee he’d talk about her, which he never does.”

  “Then what about Sergio?” asked Marisa. “He was already a teenager when she died—he’ll have to remember something.”

  “Sergio hates her,” said Omar. “I don’t even know why—as soon as anyone talks about her he just curses and leaves the room. Once I pressed him on it and he told me she was the worst person he’d ever known.”

  Marisa frowned. “Does anyone else remember her that way?”

  “No one else who remembers her will talk about her,” said Omar.

  “Yeah, I know what that feels like,” Marisa said, thinking back on every conversation she’d tried to have with her father about the night of the accident. She stopped, chewing on her lip as she thought. “There’s got to be some way we can learn more. What about . . .” She tried to think: Who else knew Zenaida when she was alive, and was old enough to remember it? Omar’s sister, La Princesa, had been five, which was probably still too young. And she hadn’t been in the car.

  But someone older had.

  “What about Jacinto?” she asked. “He was nine. He probably remembers her pretty well.”

  Omar scoffed. “He doesn’t like talking.”

  “You live in the same house,” said Marisa. “You have to talk to him sometimes.”

  “He lives here,” said Omar, “but over in what I guess used to be the guesthouse. He gets food delivered by nulis, or he just nukes frozen burritos and ramen. We literally never see him, sometimes for weeks in a row, and then only a glimpse.”

  “Why?”

  “Most of his body was rebuilt and replaced after the crash,” said Omar. “And it’s not that he looks weird—you know my father; he wouldn’t waste time on the cheap stuff. Jacinto has the best cybernetic body that money can buy, but I guess he just . . . maybe it’s because it’s not his, you know? Like he’s a stranger in his own body, so he feels like a stranger everywhere else, too.”

  “That’s awful,” said Marisa.

  “He mostly just lives online,” said Omar. “If it weren’t for the house computer tracking vital signs, we’d barely even know he was there.”

  “That’s it!” said Marisa. “Your house computer. It’s bound to have information about her.”

  “You want to hack my house computer to ask it about my dead mother?”

  “We don’t have to hack it,” said Marisa, “it’s yours—just ask it. You can do it right now.”

  “I don’t have full access,” said Omar. “I help my father with a lot of his business, but he still has a lot of secrets.”

  “Sounds like you all do,” said Marisa with a sigh. She tapped her fingers on the table, staring at the djinni. “So I guess the question is: How badly do you want to know this one?”

  Omar was silent again, and then started chuckling dryly. “Oh, Mari, Mari, Mari. You have no idea what you’re asking for.”

  “I’m asking a mob boss’s son to help me hack into his father’s private server.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” said Omar. “We have full biometric security these days—completely unhackable.”

  “So that’s it?” Marisa said. “We’re completely out of luck?”

  “Not unless you want to come over and just plug into our mainframe.”

  “Why not?” said Marisa, not a hint of humor in her voice. “You get me through the biometrics, and I can crack everything else in . . . two hours, tops.”

  “And how am I supposed to get you into my house?” asked Omar. “Even if the old feud hadn’t just been brought to the surface again, my father’s not going to let any Carnesecas within three blocks of his house, let alone right inside and plugged into the mainframe. We’re on high alert in here. It’s an anti-Carneseca zone.”

  “That only makes me want these answers more,” said Marisa. “What made them so mad? Do you think . . . okay, so what about this: Do you think my dad helped your mom fake her death? Maybe she wanted to leave, and this was the only way she could do it, and your dad found out about it just barely too late to stop them.”

  “Why would your dad do that?”

  “How should I know? Get me into your house computer and let’s figure it out.”

  “Let me think,” said Omar. “How do I get Marisa Carneseca behind enemy lines?”

  “I can spoof my djinni ID,” said Marisa. “Make it read me as someone else.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m amazing,” said Marisa.

  “You’re a straight-up criminal,” said Omar.

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “We can do this,” said Omar. “If you spoof your ID, then I don’t have to get Marisa Carneseca into the house, I just have to get a girl into the house—and that, I assure you, is one of my specialties.”

  “You’re gross.”

  “It gets better,” he said. “You still have that green dress?”

  “Midcalf or midthigh?”

  “Midthigh,” said Omar. “Shorter if you can manage it. Spoofed ID or not, the enforcers know your face, and we need to make sure they’re looking at something else.”

  “You’re going to disguise me as my butt? Are men really that stupid?”

  “I’m going to disguise you as one of several butts,” said Omar. “I’m going to throw a party, and you’re goi
ng to blend into a very scantily dressed crowd.”

  “You’re right,” said Marisa. “This is way grosser than I thought.”

  “It’s just a party.”

  “It’s a sex party.”

  “It is, at worst, an underage drinking party.” Omar described it as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “No sex. In fact, I’ll keep it all college girls this time, so it’s not even ‘underage,’ just ‘drinking.’”

  “You and a bunch of girls?”

  “And a bunch of guys,” said Omar. “I’ll invite my frat.”

  “Of course you’re in a frat.”

  “All you have to do is doll yourself up a bit to get through the door,” said Omar. “Once you’re inside I can take you to a back room, plug you in, and run interference so nobody suspects anything. In a crowd that big, one girl isn’t going to stand out. And I throw these parties often enough that no one will bat an eyelash at another one.”

  Marisa hesitated. Did she really want to do this? No. But she wanted the information.

  The bigger question, though: Did she really trust Omar? No, but in this case she and Omar wanted the same thing, which was as much of an insurance policy as she could hope for. He might have been a dirtbag, but he was, at least for now, a convenient dirtbag.

  “Fine,” she said, “but you make sure it’s a big enough party that two girls won’t stand out. I’m not going into that lion’s den alone.”

  “Don’t bring Anja,” said Omar. “She still hates me—she’ll probably start breaking stuff.”

  “As fun as that would be,” said Marisa, and looked down at the bloody djinni, “I’m going to give Anja this thing I’m working on, and bring Sahara to the party instead. How fast can you make this happen?”

  “I’m already working on it,” said Omar. “Tomorrow night at ten.”

  “Isn’t that kind of late for a party?”

  “Marisa,” he said, “you’ve been going to the wrong kinds of parties.”

  SEVEN

  “My fans are going to lose their minds,” said Sahara. She and Marisa were wearing their tightest dresses and highest heels, and walking through the hot Los Angeles evening toward the Maldonado complex. Even at 10:00 p.m., the sky was only barely dark, and the two camera nulis were swirling around them in an eager dance: one filming in front of them, to show their faces, and one behind to show their other assets. Marisa hated this kind of exhibitionism, but Sahara reveled in it. “A college party in one of the most expensive houses I have ever seen—and not just any expensive house, the house of a notorious crime boss. We’ll probably have half the police officers in LA watching the feed tonight, just to get a glimpse inside.”

  “Which is maybe not ideal considering our illegal infiltration,” said Marisa.

  “Relax,” said Sahara. “The nulis aren’t recording our voices right now, and as soon as we get inside I’ll activate the algorithm that makes them avoid filming you—it’ll be like you’re not even there.”

  “So you’ll keep all of the online attention on you,” said Marisa. “Can you keep all the in-person attention on you, too?”

  “Honey,” said Sahara, “if I don’t have every eye in that building focused solely on me, it’ll be a downright insult.”

  “Well, heads up,” said Marisa, and nodded toward the crowd on the street ahead of them. “Time to check out the competition.”

  The Maldonado estate was a full block, maybe eighty meters on a side, with a high wall around it that looked like red brick, but which Marisa knew was heavily reinforced with plastered armor. Mob bosses didn’t mess around. The wall was almost two stories high, and only one of the buildings in the complex rose above it—the main estate, with a three-story tower and a roof of classic Southern California curved clay tiles. Marisa had been inside of it once before, when relations between their families had been . . . if not friendly, at least calmer.

  She was suddenly struck by the thought that maybe she’d been here more than once, as a child. She’d been in Zenaida’s car, after all—had she been in their home as well? How close had they been? She looked up at the walls as they approached, but felt no sense of welcome.

  Only foreboding.

  Standing in front of the high metal gate—not bars, but a solid sheet of armor—was a group of girls, each of them dressed every bit as scandalously as Marisa and Sahara. They noticed the two girls approach with only mild interest; they had their own agenda, and it didn’t involve making friends with the locals. Cameron and Camilla weren’t the only camera nulis hovering over the group; some girls were posing for selfie bots, others were monologuing to vidcast subscribers, and some were simply drawing focus in the background, subtly trying to be the center of attention in the other girls’ pics and videos.

  “You are among your people,” said Marisa.

  “I want to slap every one of them,” said Sahara. “Is this what I look like to the rest of you?”

  “They look like they want attention,” said Marisa. “You look like you deserve it.”

  “I love you,” said Sahara.

  Marisa had worn her green dress—not the long one she wore to church, but the short, tight one she wore when they went dancing. The sleeves were long and the collar high, because Marisa had always tried to hide her old clunky metal arm, but then on her last birthday, when she’d upgraded to a gorgeous Jeon Generation prosthetic, Sahara had helped her to cut the left sleeve back to the shoulder, showing off the whole thing. Jeon limbs had a smooth robotic core, covered with rounded ceramic panels specifically designed not to look like skin: Marisa’s were a faintly glossy white, almost opalescent, with a soft blue glow in the gaps and joints. Tonight Marisa had turned the glow green, accenting her dress; it made a stunning contrast to the hint of sparkles in the wrist-length fabric of her other arm and the burnished bronze color of her skin.

  Sahara was dressed, as always, in a dress of her own design: tonight’s was red and yellow and black, in not just the colors but the shape of a monarch butterfly. Thin layers of material fluttered around her, with the bottom slit high up the center and the top spreading out into two diaphanous wings. Tiny floating nulis, each barely the size an apricot, were strategically placed throughout the dress to hold it up, calibrated to Sahara’s movement and controllable through her djinni—if she wanted the wings to flap, or the skirt to twirl, it would. The whole effect was otherworldly, like a faerie or a nature spirit walking among mortals.

  The other girls looked stunning, and at any other party any one of them might have been the best-dressed person there. Tonight, Sahara outshone them all.

  “You look amazing,” Marisa whispered.

  “I’d better,” she whispered back. “I spent every last yuan on these tiny nulis. For this dress, at this party. If I don’t get a ton of new subscribers to the vidcast, I . . . I don’t know.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Marisa told her. “Go be amazing.”

  Sahara surveyed the crowd. “Looks like we have, what, twenty girls here? Twenty-five? They can’t all be hetero.”

  Marisa stifled a laugh. “You think you can make it with one of Omar’s party toys? These girls look custom-picked for frat boy fantasies. Some of them look custom-built for it. They’re like MyDragons.”

  “O ye of little faith,” said Sahara. “Watch the master at work.”

  She swirled off through the crowd, smiling and greeting each girl in turn, her dress floating behind her like a mermaid’s hair. Marisa looked up at the gate again, then blinked to get the time from her djinni: 10:08. She could already hear music inside; had the party already started without them?

  “First time?” asked a Korean girl by the wall. She wore a blue dress, textured like chain mail, that glistened in the streetlights almost like it was made of glass. “Don’t worry, they always start late.”

  “Thanks,” said Marisa. “You come to a lot of these?”

  “When I can,” said the girl. “Omar throws a good party.” She extended her hand. “I’m Yuni.�
�

  “Nastia,” said Marisa, giving her the fake name she’d picked for her spoofed ID. She leaned against the wall next to her, feeling the sunbaked bricks, warm against her back. It made her feel like a lizard, sunning itself on a rock. “So: Are these parties as crazy as I hear they are?”

  “They can be,” said Yuni. “Depends on what you’re looking for.”

  “Dancing,” said Marisa. “Fancy snacks on silver trays. Maybe some light physical contact, shoulders up.”

  Yuni laughed. “This might be a little more party than you’re ready for.”

  “Sex and drugs and rock and roll?”

  “That’s closer to the mark.”

  Marisa shook her head. “Good old Omar. I ask him for a party, he gives me a gaggle of shallow idiots looking to score with rich boys.”

  Yuni looked at her a moment, then looked back at the girls. “You ever played Salad Bowl?”

  “I love Salad Bowl,” said Marisa. “I suck at the tomato level, though.”

  “Girl over there,” said Yuni, pointing into the crowd. “Blond hair, black dress, seashell toggles on the side?”

  “I see her.”

  “She wrote that game,” said Yuni. “The girl next to her licensed it; together they’re worth what I will subtly describe as a large amount of money.”

  “Wow,” said Marisa, and then she realized the implications of what Yuni was telling her, and she felt her stomach twist into a knot. “Wow,” she said again. “I was kind of a blowhole, wasn’t I?”

  “The women at this party are almost all from Omar’s business program at USC,” said Yuni. “You don’t get into that program by being a shallow idiot.” She looked at the girls a moment longer, and then grinned at Marisa. “But to be fair, some of them are very shallow geniuses.”

  “What do you do?” asked Marisa.

  Yuni grinned. “You ever play Salad Bowl in a VR parlor?”

  “Please don’t tell me you own the VR parlor.”

  “Heavens no,” said Yuni. “The overhead on a place like that is ridiculous. But I can almost guarantee that whatever parlor you go to, they bought their djinni cables from me.”

  “Here they come,” said one of the girls, and pointed down the street at an approaching bus—wide and low to the ground, a party bus for hire.