Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014 (17 page)

I picked my way through the bodies littering the lawn. I'd take care of them in the morning.

"Your sister is asleep in the guest room," House said. "I could call the police. You could use security video to get a restraining order."

"Thanks, but no."

"I could lock her in her room," House said.

"No," I said.

I showered, and made myself a bologna sandwich with mayo and yellow mustard to settle that just nano-assembled roiling in the guts feeling.

House whispered in my ear. "There's a woman to see you," it said.

"Who?"

"She refused to identify herself. Her face is not on file. She is entirely organic, and unarmed."

The woman at the door was familiar. Short brown hair, tall, lean. It was the bomber jacket that really gave him away. Her, I mean.

"Is she here?" Peter's female voice reminded me of middle school. Light, clear. Worried.

I blinked at her. Peter's conversion looked like a default MTF; shoulders slighter, hands smaller, no adam's apple; the clone body extrapolated from his x-chromosome without any cosmetic tweaks. Her nose was too big. She wore no make-up. Her eyebrows grew together.

Still she was cute. Peter had always been the most attractive one of the group. The first who dated in high school. The one juggling girlfriends in college.

"She's asleep," I said.

She looked out at her bodies scattered throughout the yard.

"Give me a hand with this, will you?"

She grunted and grabbed a body by the hands. I took the feet.

We carried them one by one to the disassembler (disguised as a composter in accordance with historical zoning regulations) and fed them in. I slipped in blood twice, ruining my pajamas.

"The changing teams idea isn't going to fly," I said.

"No?"

"She killed me after I suggested it."

"She could be the man then." Peter said. I could tell from his tone of voice even he didn't think that was going to work.

"You were the man, Peter. Now you're the ex."

She started crying. Not a woman thing, but a Peter thing. Peter cried easily. Welled up at romantic movies. Jean had loved that about him.

I patted her back awkwardly.

"We'll talk about it in the morning. Unless she kills you again. In which case I'm putting out a restraining order and you'll be trapped at the spawn point. This has to stop."

I put Peter to bed on the fold-out sofa in my study, a disused room crammed with books I hadn't looked at in years.

I told House to keep Jean in her room until I'd spoken with her. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

It was one of those dreams, the ones we all have. The ones we don't talk about.

I stood at the top of a sparsely wooded hill in my pajamas in a strange predawn light. The girl standing in the grass looked a little like Jean, but more like the female version of Peter. Brown, pixie cut hair and crazy big, dark, serious eyes. She wore a short white skirt, with pink leggings covered with animated, anthropomorphized ponies.

I realized we were in Thorndon Park, overlooking the University we'd all attended, and the city beyond. We stood beside the graffiti encrusted brick water tower, looking out over the campus. The swelling dome of the nanocalpyse refracted the sunrise into sickly rainbow gradients as it crept toward us from the east, devouring the horizon. The sky looked like an acid trip. A bad one.

The girl smiled up at me.

"You're not finished," she said.

I knew exactly what she meant, in the dream. Afterward, I was unsure if she was talking about me, personally, the human race, both, or something else entirely.

"We're not done with you."

I shivered. There were two of them now, identical twins, holding hands. The ponies leapt, from leg to leg, girl to girl.

"You're not done with us."

The nanocalpyse washed over the city, the buildings dissolving into cubic grid-work skeletons. The wave crept up the hill toward the campus, disintegrating, compacting, ordering, archiving.

"Is this the past, or the future?" I asked.

The girl on the left laughed. "Silly. It's always now."

Her twin said, "They always ask the wrong questions."

The first girl reached for my hand, while hooking a forefinger at me, and I squatted. She whispered in my ear.

"But we love you anyway."

We had coffee and cinnamon Pop-tarts at the kitchen table the next morning. The coffee was automatic drip, from an aluminum can, made in a genuine, antique Mr. Coffee machine. I'd locked the knives in a liquor cabinet before letting Jean out of her room.

Peter apologized.

Jean didn't.

Peter asked what could he do, to make it right.

Jean was silent for a long time.

"I need you to be a person who didn't fuck Monica."

"I'll back out the memories," Peter said. He thumped his chest. "I never touched her."

"I need you to be a person who didn't want to fuck her."

Silence fell thickly between them.

"How do I do that?" Peter asked.

"You can't," Jean said.

"What about the baby?"

"I don't know," she said.

"You don't have to carry her," Peter said. "I'll take her. I want us to be a family. But if you can't be with me, let me have her. Please."

Suddenly Peter's gender change made more sense.

Jean balled her fists. "She's mine."

"She's half yours," Peter corrected.

Jean's eyes flicked to the empty knife rack. Then they both looked at me.

"I'll do some research," I said. "I'll let you know what your options are."

We finished our Pop-tarts in silence.

I took both of their credit keys and made them assign me power of attorney before I did anything. Custody disputes over archived children were mediated through the Zeitgeist itself, not the old family court system. There seemed to be no clear precedents, or rather, there was no pattern I could discern in the judgments. Some children stayed archived. Sometimes joint custody was awarded, sometimes sole custody, sometimes...

I went for a walk with Peter. Most of my neighbors were part of a lawn-culture group. They spent a lot of time planting, mowing, weeding, mulching, spraying, that sort of thing. We walked in the street, changing sides to avoid the spatter of spinning sprinklers. We waved at people without stopping to say hello. I didn't really know any of them. Just like the Seventies.

"I'm reimbursing you for the bodies," I said.

"You don't have to do that."

"Yes, I do. You're going to need the money if you're serious about a child. You're serious about that, right?"

She nodded.

"Here's the thing. It's going to cost. The Zeitgeist approved your custody rights— with a parallel surcharge."

"Surcharge?"

"Congratulations." I said. "You'll be the proud second single mother of the world's most expensive identical twins. If you want. It's up to you."

I handed him the printed copy of the restraining order, the birth license and parenting plan. Peter would not be allowed at the birth. He could pick up his copy of his daughter at any spawn point any time during her first week of life. If he didn't, all his parental rights were terminated.

He licked his lips looking at the financial statement. "I won't be able to..."

"You can have your daughter. Or the double life. But not both."

She nodded.

"Makes sense," she said.

Jean emerged from the spawn booth hugely pregnant with a strange sad little smile on her face. She was going to stay with me, for awhile. A few weeks. A decade. We hadn't worked out the details.

Gharlane had always been interested in kid stuff. He was excited about the cartoons we'd watch together in a few years. The video games. He had a strange fascination with
The Teletubbies.

The walk home took a long time. Jean moved pretty slowly We'll probably end up having to get a car.

Genevieve Williams's fiction has been published in
Strange Horizons
and the anthology
Future Games.
She lives in Seattle, Washington, sometime in the century before her fast-paced first story for
Asimov's
is set. Genevieve is a Clarion West alum and will soon complete her MFA in Popular Fiction through the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program.

Kip runs.

She's off crosstown with the Gymnasium dismissal bell, skimming rooftops, sky-bridges, and high-speed trains. She leaps from a ledge of the Diamond Tower, missing her landing on the slidewalk opposite, and grabs the slidewalk railing as she falls past, tucking her legs and sliding beneath it, using the last of her redirected momentum to boost herself to her feet. Before her, in a blank gray wall, stands a translucent glass cylinder that reflects the shimmering Tower behind her. Kip is here by invitation. But invitation to what, she doesn't know.

Could be Bud and Ahmad want to sponsor her.
Could
be. She's one of the best freerunners in the city, one of those to whom architecture is just so much playground. And they
are
known to follow the freerunner races. So they'd know that last month she beat Narciso—or at least, that her racing persona did. Bud and Ahmad have ways of finding out true names. Especially since some of her 'ware came from their shop. This is the Garage, lair of wetware makers and biogeneering hackers extraordinaire.

The cylinder slides open. Kip steps inside, waits patiently while it bombards her with x-rays and puffs of air. She puts her palm on a reader as instructed and winces when it pricks her for a gene sample. She widens her eyes at the retinal scanner, readily publishes the list of her add-ons and enhancements for Garage access only, and coughs into a paperlike membrane that immediately sucks away down a tube with a gulp of vacuum. Finally the glass parts in front of her and she steps out of the cylinder and into the vastness of the Garage.

And it is vast. The sims don't show the sheer size of the place. Vast, and empty-feeling, even though the scientists, artists, and gengineers fortunate enough to be among the Garage's elect cluster around holographic workspaces, esoteric musical instruments and artistic renderings of their own devising, and biochemical pools bubbling and oozing in a frenzy of reproduction. The air smells of machine oil and biology. Except for the holograms, the lighting is dim, even once her vision—en hanced to near-feline sensitivity—adapts. Aside from a persistent low-level hum and a gluey, liquid sound she can't place, it's also very quiet.

She'd give anything—almost—to be associated with this place. Cool factor several trillion. Not to mention the funding, less sexy but more urgent: she graduates Gymnasium next month and the thought of still living under her parents' roof and their authority after that fills her with panic. Hesitantly—she was invited here, after all—Kip sends a greeting into the local ambient: >

None of the creative types within her line of sight so much as glance up.

> A yellow arrow blinks in her vision, showing her where to go.

She walks through the forest of columns, taking in as much as she can, though of course they won't let her see anything really important. Just PR.

Bud and Ahmad are leaning against the rim of, and looking into, a waist-high, underlit basin filled with gel. The gel bubbles like cooking rice. Bud is short, sandy-haired, and tattooed, with the kind of slim, yet muscular build that suggests either serious workout time, or major engineering. Probably both, since bodymod is one of Bud's specialties. Ahmad is tall and lean, with long eyelashes that sweep like a model's every time he blinks. The personal aspects of Bud and Ahmad's relationship are entirely unknown; they seem to like it that way. But their work, and that of the wizards of the age they've gathered around them, has yielded some serious buzz—and more importantly, contracts of legendary lucre.

A sponsorship from them would be
such
a coup.

Neither of them looks up, though they have to know she's there. The light beneath the genetic soup in front of them gives them an unearthly pallor. Bud's face is pale as something that's lived under the Street its entire life. Ahmad looks like he hasn't slept in a week. Experimentally, Kip tries releasing these observations to the general ambient.

She can't. They really do have this place thoroughly perimeterized. Oh well.

"First rule of PR," Ahmad says, his dark eyes still focused on the green-lit basin in front of him. "Control all buzz. It's fine to tell the world I haven't slept in a week, but you shouldn't tell them that I
look
it."

Kip makes no response to this. What could she say? So she just stands there and lets them make their impression.

"Got a job for you," Bud says. He's still staring into the basin, too. Their aloof manner is so different from their PR—outgoing, friendly, making eye contact—that it weirds her out. "Courier gig. Across town."

Kip is disappointed. They're not sponsoring her. The thought of that easy money, and with it an easy emancipation from the impending doom of Gymnasium graduation and her parents, melts away. Then it ticks what they
are
offering. Not sponsorship, no... but nearly as cool, as people are saying again these days.

"Here's our bid," Ahmad says, passing her a number in the ambient. "Go ahead and compare it to the going rate. We'll wait." Kip does. Of course pricing for courier services varies widely and much of the data would require more time than is polite to ferret out. But what she does find in the ambient excites her, and even more so when he says, "Forty percent up-front. Key us your account."

"What's the package?" she asks, though it's not like she's going to say no.

A tiny object flies toward her face. She snatches it out of the air.

"That," Ahmad says. They still haven't looked at her, either of them. A stream of chatter thick as a pipe flows between them in the ambient, but of course it's encrypted all to hell, even here within the sanctum of the Garage, and she can't make out a word of it.