Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (16 page)

It occurred to Sophie that she could throw them away. She knew people had done without such things not too long ago—gone about grief the slow way, waiting for the pain to fade and trying to keep hold of the good memories. That just wasn’t how it was done anymore. It took too much time and there was no point to hurting that much over something that couldn’t be helped.

She stared at the bottle, one hand buried in Albert’s fur. Letting go of Deanna made sense. People would expect her to be back to normal when she returned to work in a week. It was ridiculous to imagine that she would be able to pretend things were fine if she didn’t take the tablets. She would sleep badly and dream too much. Work wouldn’t get done. It was possible she could lose her job over it. She might never be able to fall in love again. Her parents and friends would worry, maybe even pull away. Sophie didn’t want to be old-fashioned and useless like the funeral.

But if she didn’t remember Deanna, nobody would. Deanna hadn’t been brilliant at anything, never made a fortune, painted a masterpiece, won a championship game. Her parents and brother had already all but forgotten her. It felt disloyal to do the same. Sophie loved her. Deanna was supportive, immature, playful, lazy. She loved Sophie even when she was controlling and snappish. She thought Sophie was beautiful first thing in the morning. All of it was worth remembering.

Sophie picked up the bottle and opened it, dumping the tablets into her hand. The easy way wasn’t always wrong. Mourning Deanna wouldn’t benefit anyone but her and probably not even that. It was pure selfishness. A few more tears dripped off of her chin. She got up and headed for the bedroom. Albert heaved himself to his feet and followed.

Sophie detoured to the bathroom. She raised the toilet lid. Her hand trembled as she stared at the little pills. Mind nearly blank, she turned her hand over and let them fall. Heart racing in her chest, she hit the lever and watched the water go down.

With a shuddering sigh, Sophie returned to their bedroom, pretending to ignore Albert as he hopped up onto the bed. Tomorrow she would figure out how to recover, return to work, and live her life without forgetting. She didn’t know if she could do it, but as selfish as it might be, Deanna was hers. Sophie wasn’t going to let her go that easily.

“Needs More Coffee” by Rachel Keslensky

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A woman with short, messy hair held back with a headband stands against a background of stars. She is facing the viewer, in a pin-up girl type style. In her left hand, she holds a mug with steam rising from it. Her right hand is pressed against her upper chest in an expression of surprise. An exclamation mark symbol is projected from the glasses over her right eye and it hangs in front of her face. She is wearing a very short robe that is tied to one side. On her left foot, she has on a fuzzy slipper. Her right leg is a shiny prosthetic.

Morphic Resonance

Toby MacNutt

If it weren’t for the damned new highspeed maglev trains, he’d never have known. Vasily was emphatically not a fan—but the old trains were being steadily replaced, like it or not. The ride was not just quicker, but smoother, for most everyone else, and as a result the cars were frequently crowded. The worst thing about them, though, was that the morphic docking spots for people floating on g-skips or using other mobile aids had a tendency to slip; something about the new trains’ stronger magnetic fields interfering with the resonators.

That’s what had happened: in a too-crowded train, on a too-fast section of track, the resonator gripping his g-skip had cut out. Vasily went sailing off into the bodies around him. He tried to tug his arms into position fast enough to grab a rail, but his fingers slipped off and past. They caught on the arm of a fellow passenger, instead—or should have. His hand hit the man’s coat-sleeve, and slowed, but did not stop. The fabric provided no more resistance than water, and Vasily’s fingers sank into it, and below, into what ought to have been the flesh of the man’s arm. It wasn’t till his grasping hand wrapped around a little metal post, there in place of bone, that Vasily made sense of it: a hard-light hologram, in place of a prosthetic.

In that split-second of slip and grasp, there wasn’t time to wonder about it. He slipped, flailed, was caught by other passengers; the man with the projected arm didn’t notice till Vasily touched its true core, and in that moment he turned and winked, before slipping further into the crowded car.

Vasily’s curiosity overcame even the terror of slipping weightless into the crowd. He was intrigued, rather than shaken, and kept replaying the memory as he made his way home. Slip. Grasp. Fall. A green woollen coat-sleeve, broad round shoulder, substantial but nonexistent bicep. He could still feel the texture of the post in his fingertips, its smooth curve and tiny threads; otherwise he might think he had imagined it. And then the face of its owner, dark broad cheekbones, densely curly short dark hair, warm brown eyes, that fleeting wink. The wink that had seemed to say
welcome to our secret
—but with no fear of reprisal.

Hard-light holograms were heavily licensed technology, and had never been cleared for prosthetic use, Vasily was sure; a quick web search confirmed. There’s no way that had been a sanctioned use—but where would you even get such restricted technology? And then: to wear it so flagrantly! Anyone could have knocked into his arm on that train!

The thought was still tumbling through his head the next morning. His resonators worked in sequence, pulling fabric around his floating body, implant-chrome and his skin and its art all slowly disappearing. (Who had that man been? Government? Hacker? Just a rich playboy?) His tattoos were plain ink, decoration only, no augments. All the same, he liked having them close and covered, private. The resonators let him dress much more efficiently and stylishly than he could have managed alone, these days, and their effortless, infinitely configurable fabrics still felt like the most indulgent of luxuries. (Where would you go, to get projection tech? Why would you want it, and not a functioning prosthesis?) He was in a layered frame of mind and went for outward layering, too: full-length soft stretch jersey base layers, wrap pants, loose vest, scarf, armwarmers, all in shades of ruby and chestnut. The g-skip’s gentle fields settled him comfortably upright, on a little cushion of suspension and warmth. (How had he been so confident? Cheeky, even.) He checked his reflection in the wall-mirror: blue eyes shining out amidst the layers of browns, sharp cheek and jaw bones softened by the drape of fabrics and his shoulder-length curtain of auburn hair. (Who was he?) It would work. He went out.

Vasily kept his eyes open for the man with the arm that wasn’t. He looked for brown, and for green, and for any strange clipping errors in reality; he jostled up against strangers far more often than was strictly necessary, rather than letting the g-skip buffer him in crowded places. He sought out mezzanines and upper windows to look out on the people below, though what he’d do if he saw the man from afar he didn’t know. At public computer stations he searched for as much as he dared: shape-shifter stories from the tabloids, boilerplate tech regulations, obscure licensure loopholes, scientific publications on hard-light advances.

Heading past the washrooms at the library, his eyes flicked habitually over the doors. Morphic-enabled doorhandles to the women’s and men’s, first. Then, this close to the center of town, the restricted fob-tap to the androgynes’ room, as alluringly enigmatic as ever—and with that he jolted a little, internally. If his winking stranger was using contraband projection technology for
one
part of his body, what
else
might be projected? How much of what Vasily had seen had been physically real? He didn’t have the look of most androgynes, far too broadly masculine for that, but if he was using hard-light projecting for one out-license purpose already… it might be reshaping the rest of him, too.

This thought only fed his obsession: if there was a way to shape-shift yourself, even just a glamour, without going through the governmental demands and scrutiny involved in aesthetic licensure or authorised gender alteration, he wanted to know. He ached for it.

It was the trains that did it, once again. Vasily was on the same green-line ultrafast, but late at night; the car was nearly empty. He’d docked, buffers up and strong, and had a hand at the wall toward the nearest rail, just in case. Trains were not to be trusted.

The door between cars opened, and Vasily got a brief glimpse at the person who stepped through—tall, dark, broad shoulders, warm browns, reds—before the lights flickered out. The power had gone, somehow, though the train still moved and light still glowed from the previous and following cars. It was cut only here. And that meant the morphic point was unpowered, too, and he was sliding, again, slick as oil on water across the car…

He scrabbled in the darkness, caught only air, shrieked a little without meaning to. He hit something solid, but soft, and hands caught him.

“Hello again, Vasily Lewandowski.” The hand on his right shoulder was warm, smoothly curved. The hand on his left was cool and unyielding, dense.

He twisted in the g-skip’s embrace, looking for a face in the shadows. “How do you know? Who
are
you?
What
are you?!”

“You weren’t subtle. Searching for information at the public library instead of at home is a good start, but the logging technology is too good. And we wondered if we might hear from you, so we were watching more than usual.”

“Who’s ‘we’? You aren’t—” he faltered “—Teeth, are you?”

“Not Teeth. Not Hands, either, no pun intended.” He wriggled his prosthetic fingers, this time apparently solid, against Vasily’s thin arm. “No, I am not the government’s man. But you’ll have to take my word for that.”

“Then… what? What are you?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Vasily huffed, put out. “Then why all this! Why follow me, why talk to me? Why do—whatever it is you’ve done to the train?”

“Despite what I’ve done with the train, it’s not entirely safe to talk here. But if you need to know more, this will reach me, securely.” He pressed a little hard plastic square into Vasily’s hand, and gently nudged the ’skip back towards the dockpoint. “Just press. It’s a resonator, I’ll know, and I’ll come to you. Stay put at home, after. We’ll have to flash your block.”

Vasily shook his head, trying to clear it. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I know! Out of time. Catch you later, kiddo.”

“But—who are you? What’s your name? Why does this—”

The man interrupted: “Call me Ammon.”

And the lights came back on, and Vasily was safe in the dockpoint’s grasp once again, and Ammon was gone.

The calling-card Ammon had given him was no more than a thin dense wafer of plastics. One side was smooth, gently translucent with veins of thin wiring showing through. The other side had a nubbled edge surrounding a central square of pale blue mesh. If Ammon was to be believed, it was some kind of resonator key; it must have a matching morphic output, somewhere.

He studiously ignored it for four whole days. He wouldn’t call. He didn’t want to know; it was dangerous.

The card watched him from its spot on the shelf by the door. He felt as if it had eyes on him, tracking his every move. He hid it in a little box of wood-inlay. It didn’t help.

He shouldn’t call. A stranger with out-license tech: a preposterous proposition.

And yet.

He lasted another three days. Early that morning, home alone, he asked his resonators to fetch it down. He held it in his palm, released, turned it over and over, spinning it in the ’skip-field. Such a little thing—most folks would be able to crush it without a thought. He reached for it, trembling, brought his fingertip into contact with the mesh. It yielded immediately; his finger sank into it, deeper than the chip ought to have allowed. The translucent materials glowed gently, with a warmth like amber, and stayed ghost-lit even after he took his hand away.

He waited, stared at the little glowing cardlet. He tried not to panic; he breathed deep for a while, shaking, wondering what he’d launched, if he’d just dropped himself into trouble’s maw. Government watchlists, anarchist plots, identity theft, black-market body-runners: what else? He wondered if he’d done anything at all, or just been taken for a fool.

It just glowed softly at him, silently. Nothing else happened.

Two hours later, the power went out. His heart leapt in his throat and his breathing sounded loud, so loud, as the constant passive hum of his resonators faded into the blackout. His blood thundered in his ears, almost drowning out the next sound: three quick raps on the door.

The building was usually shaped to his needs by morphic technology; with a full power cut (why hadn’t the backup generators come on?), he was a fish out of water, though thankfully the g-skip carried its own charge. He fumbled at the doorknob, grip slipping. He swore briefly, bitterly, and got a better grasp. It came open.

Ammon was there, apparently two-armed once again. He wore a nondescript black jacket, messenger bag slung over his shoulder.