Futures Near and Far (3 page)

I ducked sideways. Too late. Three slugs tore into my chest.
I fell on the tile walkway and threw up blood all over the winery harvest scene I’d just coded into the mosaic. As
I tried to raise my head, I lost consciousness.

I woke up hanging upside down from a pod. Healed but
disoriented, I slowly recognized the watercourse below and behind me as the confluence of the Willamette and the
Columbia. We were heading east at a frightening rate of speed.

A rope held me tightly
around one ankle, hemp gnawing into the skin. The acceleration and drag
prevented me from reaching up to grasp it with my hands. I twisted around and
saw Mount Hood expand to fill the horizon.

“Cheryl!” I screamed at the open pod door. “Stop it, Cheryl!
This isn’t going to get you anywhere!”

Cheryl leaned out of the hatch. Wind blasted her hair to one
side of her face. She waved and cupped her hand
to her ear as if to say, “Sorry, Mom. Can’t hear you.”

“Cheryl! I’ll give you five seconds to knock this off.
Otherwise I’m filing a complaint!”

I was lying. If I filed a complaint, the cops might
interfere in ways Ellen Branson and I didn’t want them to. But it was the only
threat I could come up with on the spur of the moment.

Mount Hood took over the
scenery. Snow turned to steam near the caldera. The pod slowed. I swung back
and forth on the cord, trying desperately not to lose my lunch again, assuming
the docs had put it all back in my stomach.

The vivid orange tones of
the caldera spread across the landscape below me. The pod came to a
stop.

“Oh, no. She wouldn’t,” I whispered. Sweat began to pop from
every crevice of my body. “Cheryl! Don’t you do it! Don’t you
dare
!”

I could finally grab the cord. I started frantically
climbing hand over hand.

Cheryl stuck her head out of the hatch of the pod, smiled,
and released the cord.

I fell through surprisingly cool air toward the sea of lava.
I knew I wouldn’t just burn. I’d be vaporized. Sure enough. I landed, and that
was that.

My ethereal self manifested high above the volcano. I
watched Cheryl’s pod fade toward the horizon.

Below, my physical self
had not left even a dark spot on the molten rock. With it so thoroughly
eradicated, nothing hindered the death process. The Big White Light emerged
from a cloud and hung there like a second sun. It drew me upward.

The characteristic, ineffable calm of death chased away all
concerns. The events of the life I was leaving rolled past me, memory upon
memory, but with a peculiar distance, a detachment. I was removed from all
worries, obsessions, emotional triggers.

The Light took me away to wherever it is that dead folks go.
If anything happened to me on the other side, I can’t remember it now. One
instant I was rising toward the afterlife above a volcano, and in the next, I
awoke in my apartment.

Naturally, as soon as the Net had verified that I didn’t exist anywhere in the civilized universe,
the nanomat in my bed had reconstituted me, using the scan it had
routinely taken of me during the night.

I raised onto my elbows, serenaded by the sound of the mat’s water reservoir refilling.
Now
the emotions came.

I put my hands over my
face and shook. This was worse than the axe. I curled into a fetal
position — an appropriate posture, all in all, considering that I had, in a
sense, been reborn. The old Monica was dead, dead, dead.

Complete body annihilation is so rare in our culture that
people forget that being shifted into a duplicate isn’t quite the seamless
continuance it’s advertised to be. The body I currently inhabited didn’t
exactly match the one that had been fried in the volcano. It was a copy of a me
that had existed several hours earlier.

My mental recall of my experiences was intact — those
memories were part of my consciousness, carried with my ethereal self. But my
new body lacked the subtle molecular alterations that my old body had
undergone, and without those, I had no access to my short-term emotional
memory.

I recalled nothing of what I had felt that morning. I knew I
hadn’t been pleased with the resident whose house I had landscaped, I knew I’d
been scared when I’d fallen into the volcano, but now I scanned through those
events as if they’d happened to some actress in a vid.

No matter that the missing emotions were those of job
frustration, fear, and anger, they’d been mine. Now they were gone, killed as permanently as my whole person would
have been had I been part of my grandmother’s generation. It was only a little
piece of death, compared to what Granny went through, but it brought back all
the old terror of mortality with a vengeance.

“Access Link,” I said, when I could stop trembling.
“Branson, Ellen, psychologist. Priority interrupt.”

In moments, Ellen’s disembodied voice filled the room. “I’m
with a client. Hang on a sec. I’ll come to you.”

She blinked in, saw me still lying on the nanomat, and
flinched at my expression.

“Oh, dear. A total wipe?”

“You got it,” I said weakly.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Monica. I didn’t think she’d go
that
far. How in the hell did she—”

“A volcano.”

“Oh.” The therapist swallowed. “That would do it, I guess.
This is no good. We have to shift our strategy.”

“No more strategies,” I said. “I believe her, Ellen. She’s
going to archive herself. I think I should make arrangements with her to be
there.” I huddled on the bed, wishing I were smaller.

“No. That’s exactly the
wrong tactic. She’s sucked you in every other time, and it’s only
perpetuated the cycle.”

“It’s kept her alive.”

“No,” Ellen said. “I thought we’d been through that. We’ve
got a dependency here that has to be shown for what it is.”

I stared at Ellen through blurry eyes. How could she be so
clear, so sure? I’d tried, really tried over the years to make Cheryl stand on
her own. But when she did something dramatic, was it wrong of me to go
overboard the other way and lavish her with attention until her mood passed?
She was the only child I’d ever be permitted. If there was a dependency here,
it was my fault. What if it were simply too soon in her life for her to grow
up?

“What if you’re wrong?” I asked. “What if she really does
archive herself?”

She hesitated, and that really scared me. I’d never seen Ellen doubt herself. “You lose a daughter. I
lose a client, and maybe my adept rating as well,” she said softly.

“But you still think we should try?”

She nodded slowly. “I think it’s a gamble we have to take.”

Again the hesitation. But strangely, seeing that she was
uncertain, too, pushed me past my own weakness.

“What’s next, then?” I asked.

Ellen paced to the far wall and back. “We can’t leave you
exposed like this. We need to set up the time and place for the next
confrontation. I want you to disappear for
the next two days. Block the Link to incoming calls — all calls, just in case
she gets one of her gonzo friends to access for her. Keep moving. Stay far away
from home. But first, I want you to do some things here in the apartment. . . .”

I’d waited long enough. Did she think I had forever? Early
afternoon, the day before the Big Check-Out, I tried to raise Mom on the Link.

“Access blocked,” the Link replied.

Son of a bitch. “Where is she?” I asked the Net.

“New Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, California. She is
walking.”

I marched out of my place and hailed a pod. I’d track her
down, even if it meant sorting through all the tourists on S.F. Island.

Before I was airborne, I had a better idea. I rerouted the
vehicle to Monica’s apartment.

I made it to her front door and pressed my thumb against the
lock. If my guess were right, Mom hadn’t bothered to remove my DNA signature
from the lock’s database. She was terrible about those sorts of details.

“Monica is not at home,” the door said.

So far so good. It wouldn’t have spoken at all if it hadn’t
recognized me.

“I need to get in.”

“Please wait,” it said. I knew it was placing a call to Mom.
I also knew the Link wouldn’t put it through. A door query was too routine to
override the block. “Monica does not respond.”

“She’s taking a little retreat,” I said. “She asked me to
look after the apartment for a day or so.”

This apparently satisfied the door’s guard program. It
unlocked.

I meandered through the rooms. I hadn’t been past the front
room for two months, but the place was mostly the same. Other people might
order their domiciles to redecorate themselves every week, but not Monica. Once
in a while she’d move a wall, to create a more open feel, but she’d left things
more or less alone ever since she’d moved out of the larger place we’d shared
during my childhood. The Japanese rice paper scroll above the toilet had been there so long that it would have
disintegrated had not the housekeeping programs restored it periodically.

I brewed some tea and strolled onto the balcony. A hummingbird stole nectar from a trumpet vine
blossom not five feet away. The bird’s ruby throat shifted momentarily
to match the brassy tone of the flower — the city parks and rec department sure
liked those chameleonic hummers — then the little thing rose up, perched in
midair to regard me, and whizzed off so fast I couldn’t track it.

Mom had generated the original of that trumpet vine when I was ten. What was that creator’s name?
Oh, yeah. Josef Rautiainen, one of the first Finnish horticultural
maestros. Her hero.

Something about the apartment was wrong. The tea grew
lukewarm while I puzzled it out.

I was drawn into the master bedroom. Gradually, by instinct,
my gaze drifted to the large montage picture frame opposite the bed. Scenes of
Mom’s life filled the rectangles and ovals. I located the two portraits of her
parents — one showing them in advanced middle age, just before the immortality
threshold was reached; another of them restored to youth, as they looked on the
day their ark left for Proxima Centauri. There were wedding shots of their
parents, for whom nanotech didn’t arrive in time. My great uncle, my mom’s old
friend Glorie, Monica herself at a university graduation and at tourist sites
across the solar system — they were all here.

But where was the picture of me on my first set of roller
skates? And the one of her nursing me when I was two months old?

I passed into the dining room. She’d always kept a drawing
that I’d done at age six fastened to the food exchanger. She’d been amused by
the artwork’s scatological humor — I’d just figured out for the first time that
the food the dining table created for us was a recycled version of what we put
in the toilet.

No drawing. Not believing my eyes, I rushed into the workout
room. I stepped on the mat and said, “Run routine thirty-seven.”

A virtual of a svelte woman in a leotard appeared at the
edge of the mat and began a regimen of exercises. I stared at her blankly.
Routine thirty-seven should have been the recording of me, as a teenager,
running through an entirely different set of calisthenics. Mom used to play it
back quite often.

I stalked through the apartment, scanning right and left. I
didn’t have to search through much. Monica didn’t like clutter; she knew she
could always call up an object from its scan if she wanted it.

Nothing. Not a trace, not a single piece of evidence to show
that she’d ever had a daughter.

That bitch. After all that talk she’d spouted at friends and
relatives about how long she’d waited, about how exhaustively she’d searched
the catalogs to find just the right sperm culture, and how she never would have
gotten permission to have me if the Cassiopeia colony hadn’t opened up,
prompting the policymakers to rescind the birth moratorium for her age group.

She couldn’t even wait until I was dead to erase me from her
life.

I kept down the bubble that was trying to work its way up my
esophagus. I relaxed my fingers, but they kept curling into fists. Mom was
going to have
quite
a reception
waiting when she got back.

“Good evening, Monica,” said my door. “You have visitors.”

I took two steps back
toward the elevator. I had dreaded this moment ever since Ellen and I had
confirmed that Cheryl had taken the bait. My heart pounded, threatening to
bruise the inside of my rib cage.

“Shield at level ten,” I said.

Normally I maintain my personal body shield on level two — just
enough to keep gnats and flies from getting in my face. I don’t like setting it
so high that it stops bullets; the feedback
makes me feel as if I’m moving through molasses. But I couldn’t walk in there
unprotected.

I pressed my thumb to the lock and shoved the door inward.

A body dangled from my chandelier, noose tight around her
neck, blue tongue protruding from her mouth. Her jeans were wet at the crotch
where the bladder had voided during strangulation.

It was not Cheryl. My offspring sat in a hammock chair at
the far side of the living room.

“Hi, Mom,” she said sweetly.

Cheryl rocked gently to and fro. Behind her the window
broadcast a panoramic sweep of tropical island beach, dotted with coconut palms
and bougainvillea. I recognized the flowers
as a hybrid designed by Maestro Nathaniel Martin. I’d always hated the
maestro’s bizarre color combinations. I
hated hammock chairs. Cheryl knew those things.

Something was odd about her looks, something I couldn’t quite pin down. But I was too agitated to
dwell on it.

I scowled at her friend in the noose. “Any others around?”

“Just Jacques.”

I raised an eyebrow. She pointed at the closet.

I opened the door. The body of a man flopped onto my carpet,
so stiff that he bounced like a mannequin and so brittle that he shattered
three fingers. Frost rained out of his curly hair like a massive case of
dandruff.