Active Memory

by Dan Wells

  Boom.

  “I found something,” she said. “Ingrid Castañeda died the same day Zenaida did—or, I guess, the same day we thought she did. The day of the accident. Gunshot wound.”

  The other girls looked up, then refocused their eyes on their djinnis. A moment later Anja nodded.

  “Yup. Gonzalo Sanchez, too. Gunshot.”

  “And Ricardo Guzmán,” said Sahara. “Same day, same cause of death.”

  “That’s either a hell of a coincidence,” said Marisa, “or Grendel’s trying to tell us something.”

  Sahara held up her finger. “Some of these news articles I’m looking at talk about a turf war—Don Francisco was already powerful even back then, but he didn’t have Mirador locked down yet. He was fighting for control with a rival crime family: a Russian group called the Severovs. Maybe there was a coordinated attack on the day of the crash—maybe these three were all Maldonado enforcers, and the Severovs came after them.”

  “That could explain why Zenaida was in the car,” said Anja. “She was trying to get away from a rival hit squad, so she got in the car, and then maybe they . . . hacked her car’s navigation? So she turned off the autopilot and tried to drive herself.”

  “Maybe,” said Marisa. It was a good theory, and it meshed with a lot of her own thoughts, but it wasn’t perfect. “That doesn’t explain why I was in the car, though, or what my dad had to do with it. There’s no way he was a Severov gunman.”

  “Maybe he was a Maldonado gunman,” said Anja. Marisa shot her a withering glance, but the girl only shrugged. “That’s not completely ridiculous, right? Francisco and your dad obviously knew each other. What’s the whole mystery—that the Don has an old beef with your dad but also protects him? Or something like that?”

  Marisa nodded, but sighed at the same time. “In part, yes.”

  “So maybe your dad was Zenaida’s bodyguard or something—he could have been in the car too, for all we know. Don Francisco never forgave him for failing to protect Zenaida, but your dad did save Omar and Jacinto’s lives, so the Don, like, owes him.”

  “Maybe,” said Marisa. She didn’t want to think of her father as an enforcer, though.

  And yet . . .

  Was that why he always refused to talk about it? Because he didn’t want his children to know that he used to run with a gang?

  Was that why he fought so much with Chuy over being in a gang himself?

  An icon appeared in her djinni, accompanied by a soft audio alert. “I have a phone call,” she said.

  Sahara looked at her warily. “From who?”

  Marisa grimaced at the icon. “Detective Kiki Hendel of the LAPD.” She hesitated, then blinked to open the call. “Hello, Detective.”

  “Marisa,” said Hendel. “Are these messages from you?”

  Marisa looked at Anja. “No, ma’am, I haven’t sent you any messages. What messages have you gotten?”

  Hendel ignored the question. “Have you been doing anything related to the chop shop we talked about?”

  Marisa gritted her teeth, then shook her head and tried to make her voice sound as innocent as possible. “No, I haven’t, why do you ask?”

  “We have you and your friends on surveillance footage in the Foxtrot City dance club barely half an hour ago,” said Hendel. “We know the chop shop was there as well because that’s why we were surveilling the club in the first place. And then mere moments after you left the club, we started getting anonymous messages about a member of the chop shop heading off to kill someone.”

  “That,” said Marisa, “is a startling string of coincidences.”

  “You have to stay away from this,” said Hendel. “Those men are dangerous in the extreme—especially for someone with a cybernetic arm. I am sick of finding hands in alleyways, and I don’t want yours to be next.”

  “Wait,” said Marisa, sitting up straighter. “You said ‘hands,’ plural. Did you find another hand?”

  “We did,” said Hendel. “Zenaida’s. Again.”

  Marisa recoiled at the thought. “Ugh, qué asco. What’s next, a foot? Her head? Are they scattering her body over the entire city piece by piece?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Hendel. “I’m not sure I do either. We didn’t find Zenaida’s other hand, we found the same one again. Her left hand, severed at the wrist.”

  “The ZooMorrow lady lost it?” asked Marisa.

  “It’s not the same one,” said Hendel. “Same wound, same DNA, different fingerprints. We don’t know what’s going on, but we know that it’s dangerous, and we know that Discount Arms is in the middle of it. Stay away from them, Marisa. You don’t have that many hands to lose.”

  TEN

  “Salad Bowl is a really weird game,” said Fang.

  “I know,” said Marisa, flicking a cucumber off to the side of the bowl. “But I don’t think I can handle Overworld right now.”

  “They have the universe at their fingertips, the entire spectrum of human imagination made possible by the limitless power of bleeding-edge virtual reality technology—and they used it to program a giant bowl of salad.”

  “And then they make you collate it,” said Jaya. “It’s like paperwork, only . . . healthier.”

  Marisa flicked a leaf of lettuce toward the cucumber, and then another leaf toward a different spot on the other side of the bowl. A giant fork started descending toward a crouton, and she ran toward it and kicked the crouton in a diving leap, sending it gliding toward the pile of lettuce and cucumber she’d already started building. She overshot, and the crouton hit the side of the bowl and bounced away in a new direction.

  “Nice,” said Anja.

  “She missed,” said Fang.

  “But she got it away from the fork,” said Sahara. “Show some solidarity. Whoo!” Sahara clapped, cheering from her perch on the lip of the giant bowl. “Good job kicking that crouton! Give it up for Mari!”

  “I don’t need your pity,” said Marisa, though the silly applause did make her feel a little better.

  “So you’re trying to turn the one big salad into a bunch of little, evenly distributed salads?” said Jaya.

  “Yeah,” said Marisa, knocking another cucumber into a pile just in time for a fork to spear the whole stack. “This is only level one—the tomatoes make it way harder, but they’re, like, level ten.”

  “I take it back,” said Fang. “This game isn’t weird, it’s stupid.”

  “Okay,” said Sahara. “Let’s get back to the business at hand. Also: I just realized that that’s a pun, and I’m very sorry for it.”

  “You never do puns,” said Anja.

  “Puns are the worst form of language,” said Sahara.

  “The hand business at hand,” said Marisa, stacking the final bits of lettuce, “is to figure out why there are two hands.” A fork came down, stabbed the final pile, and a shower of ranch dressing proclaimed that she had won the level.

  “Gross,” said Fang.

  “The obvious first guess is a clone,” said Jaya. “Human cloning is illegal, but ZooMorrow presumably has the technology.”

  Sahara nodded. “And if they’re running some kind of illegal cloning operation, it would explain why they were so eager to get the hand back under their control instead of out where the police could study it.”

  “The problem with that theory,” said Anja, “is that it only makes sense if ZooMorrow cares what the cops think. As we saw the other night, they have absolutely no reason to. There’s virtually no law enforcement agency that has any real authority over the megacorps—they kind of regulate each other through competition, but that’s it.”

  “So maybe they wanted to get the hand off the streets before another megacorp found out about it,” said Marisa. Level two began with the salad bowl becoming instantly clean, and a rain of new ingredients tumbling in: lettuce, cucumbers, croutons, and now some shaved carrots. She started punching the food into piles. “Maybe there’s a rival gengineering company trying to perfect the same s
ort of cloning tech ZooMorrow is working on, so they’re trying to keep it secret? ParaGen, maybe?”

  “But why clone Zenaida?” asked Jaya.

  “The person they need to clone is that thief from Omar’s party,” said Anja. “In fact I bet you anything she’s a ZooMorrow agent.”

  “We’re forgetting the other obvious answer,” said Sahara. “What if Zenaida’s a natural clone? What if she was a twin, or even a triplet? Hendel said they have different fingerprints. The one Mari knew died in the car accident, but the others might still be out there—or they used to be.”

  “I already looked,” said Marisa, throwing slim darts of carrot into piles around the edge of the bowl. Some of them landed askew, and when the fork speared the pile the carrots fell off. “Demonios.”

  “How do you say carrots in Spanish?” asked Fang.

  “Zanahoria,” said Jaya.

  Fang shook her head. “That is such a weird language.”

  “What is it in Mandarin?” asked Anja.

  “Better,” said Fang.

  “Luóbo,” said Jaya.

  “See?” said Fang.

  Marisa knocked the last few bits into a pile—featuring a lot more carrots than was strictly ideal—and was rewarded with another shower of salad dressing when she won the level. Her lower score only got her a B rating, so it was Thousand Island.

  “Zenaida’s not a twin,” she said, “or a triplet or anything else. And she’s not a clone, either. Hendel said the hand was identical to the first, right down to the wound. They can’t figure out what caused that wound, by the way.” Level three tried to start, but she paused it with a blink; salad ingredients hung in the air above her, frozen in time. “That’s because it’s not a wound.”

  “Oh snap,” said Anja. “Marisa already figured it out.”

  Jaya frowned. “I thought we were playing the ridiculous salad game because she hadn’t figured it out? Because she needs to think?”

  “This isn’t about thinking,” said Marisa, “it’s about frustration. I think I figured out what’s going on, but I haven’t figured out what to do about it yet.”

  “Zenaida’s hand is not connected to her body anymore,” said Fang. “That’s called a wound, right? You didn’t suddenly change all the rules of English vocabulary without telling me?”

  Marisa smiled slyly. “If there was only one hand I don’t think we ever would have solved it, but there are two. More than that, we heard Discount Arms practically give the whole the solution away, but we weren’t paying attention.”

  “That they were talking about killing somebody,” said Sahara. “That has a way of drawing focus.”

  “Yes,” said Marisa, “but there was another part of their conversation, so fast I almost missed it: they said someone was trying to undercut them. The chop shop is losing business, and their business is replacement body parts, so: What one technology answers all our questions at once? The multiple hands, the weird wounds, the ZooMorrow meddling, and the replacement organ market?”

  Sahara’s mouth fell open. “Bioprinting.”

  Marisa pointed at her. “Ándale.”

  “Bioprinters have been making limbs and organs for years,” said Jaya, smacking herself in the forehead. “Why didn’t we think of this before?”

  “Because until we found a second hand we had no reason to,” said Marisa. “Look: we already know ZooMorrow had Zenaida’s DNA on file, because it tripped an alert when the police ran a test on the hand. And we know there’s proprietary gene-tech in her DNA, so you’d have a lot of interested buyers. So: if that DNA got out somehow, and someone started printing cheap, genhanced replacement organs to sell on the black market, who are the two groups you’re going to piss off?” She held up her fingers, and counted off as she spoke: “The company you stole the DNA from, and the chop shop you’re stealing the sales from.”

  “Brilliant,” said Anja. “I knew I liked you.”

  “So Zenaida’s probably still dead,” said Jaya, “just like we thought.”

  “Exactly,” said Marisa, and felt her triumph deflate at the thought. “Exactly.”

  “This answers a lot of our questions,” said Sahara, “but we’re still missing something: a dead bioprinter.”

  “The machine?” said Fang.

  “No, I mean somewhere out there is a criminal entrepreneur who owns one,” said Sahara, “and who pissed off at least two groups of very powerful, very dangerous people. And since the hands are still showing up, and since we have yet to see any news stories about a black-market bioprinter shot dead in a gang war, that means the bioprinter is still alive.”

  “Then we have to find him,” said Marisa. “He’s the only one who knows for sure where that DNA came from. Maybe she really has been dead for fifteen years, but . . . I want to know for sure.” She stared at the bottom of the bowl for a moment, then unpaused the game and started smacking bits of onion around with furious energy.

  “So the bioprinter is our only link to the DNA,” said Sahara. “And the chop shop is our only link to the bioprinter.”

  “And you’ve already tried following them,” said Jaya. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Following them didn’t work because it was all on their turf,” said Anja. She jumped down into the bowl with Marisa and slapped a cucumber with all her might, caroming it off the side of the bowl so hard it bounced two more times before slowing. She looked up at the other girls with a devilish grin. “All we have to do is reverse it: set our own terms, and get the chop shop to follow us.”

  Marisa paused the game again.

  “You’re nuts,” said Jaya.

  “You’re dangerously, stupidly nuts,” Sahara added.

  “We can do this,” said Anja.

  “I’m not bait,” said Sahara. “Just because they already know who I am doesn’t mean I’m going to wave myself in front them like a free pot sticker.”

  “Of course not,” said Anja. “We can’t let them know who we are—we need to trap them and interrogate them in such a way that they can never trace it back to us.”

  “Normally I like the really crazy plans,” said Fang, “but this is too much even for me.”

  “They want to cut my arm off,” said Marisa. “Anja, you have a cybernetic eye—they’ll want to cut that out, too, and probably our djinnis, and any interior organs that still work, and that’s not even counting what they’ll do to us before they start cutting.”

  Anja was still smiling, as if everything the rest of them said was meaningless. “Taser nulis,” she said proudly. “We buy some cheap little flyers, load them up with a charge big enough to drop a guy, and then fill a room with them. If we can get even one of the Braydons into that room, boom goes the dynamite. We wait till they’re all down, then we tie them up and put some bags on their heads. Slicker than snot on a doorknob.”

  “I don’t understand that last part,” said Fang, “but I am totally back in on this plan.”

  “It’s too expensive,” said Jaya.

  “I’m rich,” said Anja. “Next question.”

  “How do we lure them without letting them know who we are?” asked Sahara.

  “That’s the easiest part of the whole plan,” said Anja. “We already have a lure that they are actively searching for, and that has nothing to do with us.” She shrugged. “All we have to do is turn it on.”

  Marisa stared at her a moment, then nodded when she figured it out. “Memo’s djinni.”

  “Memo’s djinni,” said Anja, pointing at her. “That’s the whole reason they’re in hiding. We take that djinni to a big empty building, fill it full of targeted nulis, and turn on the power. The evil Braydons will arrive within the hour, and we’ll have the bioprinter’s name within an hour of that. Then we walk away, and no one knows anything.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as you say it is,” said Sahara.

  Anja grinned wolfishly, showing her teeth, and bounced her eyebrows up and down. “But you’re going to do it anyway, right
?”

  Sahara sighed. “Yeah, I think we are.”

  “Heaven help us,” said Marisa.

  Anja and Sahara got to work on modifying the nulis, but Marisa had to go to work.

  San Juanito was a pretty successful restaurant, all things considered; it had been a steak place, back when beef was still affordable for the average consumer, but twenty years ago Marisa’s parents had taken out a loan, bought the place, and rebranded it as a homey “just like mi abuela used to make” northern Mexican restaurant. Marisa’s actual abuela had even helped in the kitchen, because they’d all lived in the tiny apartment on the second floor, and they’d lived on too small of a budget to afford any other help. When Chuy had gotten old enough to carry trays, they’d put him to work memorizing table numbers and hauling food out to the guests, and a few years later Marisa had started doing the same. Most restaurants these days used nuli waiters, but even when the restaurant started paying for itself—even when they grew so successful that they bought a new house and rented the old apartment to Sahara and let Marisa’s abuela stay home—they never used nulis. It was part of the old homey feel, and as long as they still had children to work for free, they could save money.

  Marisa hated working in the restaurant, but times had gotten tough, and if the alternative was losing their house and moving back into the tiny apartment? She could wait a few tables.

  She held the tray carefully while she laid each plate in front of its customer. “That’s one corn enchilada for you, one tofu enchilada for you, and one side order of jalapeño lo mein.”

  Okay, she thought, so it isn’t exactly like mi abuela used to make.

  The customers tucked into their food without so much as a thank-you, though at this point that hardly fazed Marisa. Restaurant customers were the worst. She smiled anyway, stopped at a nearby table to ask if everything was okay, and then hurried back into the kitchen to wash off the tray for the next load of food.

  “Table twelve is almost up,” said Carlo Magno. He was seated on a makeshift stool in front of the stove, frying vegetables and mushrooms with one hand while chopping a slab of sautéed Chikn™ with the other. It didn’t taste as good as the TastyChick™ they used to use, but it was cheaper, and with enough salsa you couldn’t tell what it tasted like anyway. Plus it came with the grill lines already printed on it.