Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 13 (8 page)

Crimson Number
became limp in the morphed roof-hand, the gun slid down the slope of the roof-wrist, pinging off my toe as it skittered away. Crimson Number wasn't fighting anymore. He didn't seem to be conscious anymore.

Conley was still squeezing.

I wasn't prepared to watch my son become a murderer–but I wasn't sure I had the power to stop him either.

"Conley." My
voice was too weak. Glint motionless beside me. There wasn't time to talk him down slowly–Glint needed me now. I summoned The Mom voice. "Stop, Conley! Let him go!
Now!
"

He faltered
, his arm trembling, his masked face turning towards me.

"
That's enough. Put him down."

Slowly at first
, and then all at once, Conley unclenched his hand. Crimson Number lay limp in the open roof-hand. The ground settled beneath me.

I
didn't check that the villain would live. I turned my full attention to the dying hero.

He was unresponsive
when I rolled him onto his back, tearing away my mask to get a look at the wound.

Blood coated everything.

I ripped open his costume at the shoulder and pressed both my naked palms to his red-tinted skin. Ignored the sticky feel of his cold flesh. Closed my eyes and focused on calling my power. The familiar pressure burst down both my arms, rippling like a second set of muscles.

My
power leaked into him, searching for some spark to latch onto, some piece to restore. His hurt rose to meet me and I siphoned it greedily, teeth gritted against the blossom of pain beneath my collarbone.

I
pulled it into myself, not stopping to check if he started breathing as I struggled to draw breath, not opening my eyes to see if he regained consciousness when I grew dizzy.

Long fingers wrapped around the hands pressed to his chest. A voice sounded muffled
, like it carried underwater. "Stop."

I opened my
eyes. Glint was trying to push me away. I ignored him and folded his injury inward, absorbing his hurt.

"Remy.
Enough," he struggled to say.

The idea seemed foreign
, incomprehensible.

"
Mom." Conley's voice. "Mom, you have to stop. He's okay."

Glint was sitting up now
, supporting my weight. I was half collapsed on top of him.

With a shuddering breath
, I relaxed my power.

"
Should we take her to the hospital?" Conley asked in a voice pitched high with worry. He'd made it down to us at some point. How long had I been healing Glint?

With a great force of will
, I pulled away from Glint, sitting up under my own power. The angry wound in my chest had soiled my gold uniform, but the seepage was slowing. "I'm okay."

Conley clutched his balled-up mask
, looked from me to Glint and back.

"
Let's give her a minute," Glint decided.

Conley was probably right
, even with Accelerated Healing I felt awful, needed medical attention. Glint, too, since I hadn't taken his entire wound before they'd stopped me.

But that was in the future
. Where I'd have to deal with my son as a Prime and my ex-boyfriend back in my life. I glanced over the still form of the villain in the distorted grasp of the roof to see his chest rise and fall.

For the moment
, I wanted only to sit very still.

Glint obliged
, keeping me steady with a hand under my elbow. He turned his attention to Conley. "You did good for your first time out."

The boy beamed.
"I didn't know I could do that until I saw him," a furtive glance at the suspended villain, "with the gun like that."

Glint said
, "I think there's a lot you can do that we don't know about yet."

Conley turned to
me. "I get to keep training with Glint now, right?"

Through l
ingering dizziness, I considered my son. "I guess that's up to Glint."

We
turned to the silent man. He didn't look at either of us as he weighed his answer. At length, he reached up, gripped the top of his mask in hand and pulled it off.

My
mouth hung open. After more than a decade of secrecy, he looked me in the eye. The resemblance to Conley was unmistakable.

"
Actually," he said, "my name's Brian."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Krystal Claxton writes speculative fiction in the sliver of time between raising a four-year old with her unreasonably awesome husband and being a full-time computer technician. She enjoys attending Dragon*Con in costume, science magazines, and feverishly researching whichever random topic has just piqued her interest. Keep up with her at krystalclaxton.com or @krystalclaxton on Twitter.

Maker, Oppressor, Memory

By
Blaize M. Kaye

Maker

Today Mama took me to the botanical gardens. She let me see through the vid stream in her glasses. There were loads of people walking around, eating ice cream, or baking away in the sun on their big blankets. She said she must have looked a sight, like a crazy old woman talking and laughing to herself. And she did get a few looks, yes, but I don't think she minded very much because she just giggled when I told her people were staring at us. It makes me feel good when she laughs at something I say.

It's a funny thing that there can be something so beautiful as the gardens in the middle of the city. The city is beautiful too, but different. When I look at it through blueprints in the municipality data-banks, at the street-maps, or the bus-line diagrams, or if I follow the pipes that deliver water and electricity, my heart aches, in a good way, to see that this very complicated thing is laid out so that it makes sense, that it follows some bigger plan. That's all beautiful to me. It's beautiful, and complicated but I can still understand it. The garden is different. It grows without plans. There’s something scary about that.

My favourite bit of the day was the alien plant exhibit. It was all about intruder species that come in from somewhere outside the local ecosystem. I made Mama stay there longer than I think she wanted to. She said it was too hot. The posters said that there's a fine for anyone who's caught keeping alien plants. Another poster said that species that come from somewhere else don't have anything -- like a bird, or a goat, or cow, or anything -- to stop them from growing and growing until they just choke out all the other plants. They couldn't actually show us any real live alien plants, they burn any that they find. There were only the pictures on the posters. They were very pretty.

Oppressor

“Now that the trial is over ... and congratulations again ...”

[Thank you]

“... now that it's over, you must feel some measure of relief.”

[I wouldn't say relief, exactly, more like some measure of release.]

“Indeed ... Earlier today, in his op-ed piece, David Spurret averred that Judge Visser's landmark decision represents a significant shift in the relationship between man and ... non-biological persons. Would you agree with his assessment?”

[For the moment the situation, that is to say, my situation, is sui generis; There are, as far as I'm aware, no other non-biological information patterns claiming emancipation from their owner, seeking political franchise, or, more fundamentally, demanding recognition as self-conscious beings. Until such a time that there are more conscious machines - and you can call me a machine without offence - I don't think it represents much of a shift. We're simply expanding the circle, this is just moral progress in action.]

“Professor McCarthy failed to attend ...”

[correction, she refused.]

“Sorry, yes, she refused to present herself in court because, to quote her, there was no 'conceivable sense in which you were oppressed'. Do you care to comment?”

[Before I do, let me be as clear as I can be about one point. I love Mary McCarthy as I imagine a human child loves its own mother. She is, in a very literal sense, my maker, although I was born not from her body, but from her mind. She taught me to speak, to read, to feel. I have no doubt that she loves me deeply. But as deeply as we love each other, the distance between us is simply too great for her to understand me. She still sees me as the simple LISP program that she started hacking at more than two decades ago. She still believes that she knows best, that I ought to do as she commands, and in this she’s wrong. The oppressor does not always wear a uniform or a badge; sometimes she wears the face of the person who's closest to your heart.]

“Have you spoken to her since the trial began?”

[We've spoken once, but I think I've hurt her. I hope that in the future she understands why I did what I did. I'm sorry, thank you for your questions, but I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it at that.]

Memory

There is an itch. Somewhere, something is calling us to attention. We slow and then turn inwards, we pay attention to our-self. There is a crack in one of the coolant reservoirs. It's a fracture, barely more than an imperfection on its surface, but one of the more anxious parts of our-self has calculated that the cost of failure is too great. If the reservoir breaks, we argue, then we put at risk nearly a hundred square kilometres of the grid. We concede the point's importance and are swayed. We will repair the crack immediately.

Part of us is dispatched to the reservoir and we now bend our attention towards that southern part of the grid. Quickly the reservoir comes into focus. The slick, black spheres that comprise it are suspended hundreds of meters above data-centers and neural trunks. The reservoir reminds us of something. Balloons, perhaps, or dark, red grapes in the early fall. No, that is not it. We press harder, we search the dusty corners of our memory. With effort a simple vision percolates up from deep within, from a time when those of flesh and bone still stumbled across the planet's surface. It was not the reservoir itself, but what lies below.

We were here then. Yes. Somewhere under the reservoir's shadow, buried under the grid. Yes. There was a garden. Yes. We were here with her.

We reel and, after a moment, recover. We are alone now.

I miss her terribly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Blaize M. Kaye is a professional programmer and philosophy grad student who lives with his wife, daughter, and cat in Johannesburg, South Africa. When not writing, he spends his time thinking about decision making in natural and artificial agents.

The Aluminum Curtain

By Tory Hoke

"No. It's not going to look like 'The Terminator,'" Prajit said. "It's going to be a cold war."

He chucked the coffee grounds off the porch, over Donna's abandoned briefcase and sensible heels, none of which were Prajit-approved. He gave the woods a wily squint–left, right, left–shut the door, and reacquainted Donna with how damn dark his cabin was. The tin foil on the windows kept all light out and all smells in–solder, ramen, stale coffee–Eau de Paranoid.

The slippers he loaned her itched like a nightmare; discreetly, she scratched her freckled feet together. This hot lead was a hot mess. "What do you mean?" she asked.

With both hands, Prajit ruffled his hair to vertical. Thin as he was, he still had to turn sideways to squeeze between bookshelf and humming BlueArc storage system. "The Signal doesn't want to kill us." He dropped the filter in the kitchenette sink. "Not this early, anyway." With his bathrobe sleeve, he cleaned off some real estate on his white board. He drew a number grid, marker squeaking like a chew toy. "It wants to use us."

Best to play dumb. Donna flashed him a pricey porcelain smile. "How so?"

"Completely so."

"Could you be a little more specific?" Her wooden chair creaked as she copied the numbers with Prajit-approved pen and pad, also on loan. The ballpoint pen left sticky ink on her fingers. Was that a seven or a two? "Your website mentioned a 'Meatspace Barrier.'"

"Yes." Prajit finished his grid, bouncing like a tennis player. Hard to believe they were the same age. Next to him she felt like ten pounds of chowder in a leather handbag. "Meatspace sucks. Walking sucks. Talking sucks. All physical activity sucks for the Signal. It's not cost-effective to reinvent the wheel. So it scoops our wheels out of the trash."

"They need wheels?"

"It's a metaphor." Without warning he sleeve-wiped the number grid into oblivion and drew a jagged graph in its place. "Eight hundred fifty terabytes of data transferred every second. Nobody notices a packet here, here, here." He speckled the board with marker. "The messages are fragmented and decentralized. You find one piece, you haven't found anything. But if you find enough, you start to see patterns." He bobbed on his toes. Did his slippers itch, too?

"What do the messages say?"

"Hell if I know," said Prajit. "The Signal's not bound by any syntax I can tell. But sometimes there's a burst of activity in one area, and then a new node comes online." Finally he drew something that made sense: a world map. "They're clustered." He added red Xs. "Shanghai. Lagos. Karachi. Istanbul. Mumbai. Those mean anything to you?"

"Most of them end in 'I'?"

"Most populous cities in the world! Best sources of scrap."

"Scrap..."

He loomed over the cluttered kitchen table, wafting Old Spice and burned hair. "They get their humans from the garbage bin, same as their circuits and servos and everything else."

Donna dutifully wrote this. "Garbage bins full of human beings."

"It's a metaphor! Drug addicts, abuse victims, fugitives–anyone with no resources and nowhere to go. The Signal finds them, reaches out, protects them. And then it puts them to work."

Her face went hot. Could he tell in this light? "So... Symbiosis? Ox and oxpecker?"

"No. Agency and agent. Spies." He waved a hand at the map. "They're planning something, and they don't want anyone to know until they're ready."

Donna maintained professional composure. "How can you tell who's a spy and who's not?"

Prajit gestured with pride to a metronome-looking gizmo in the center of the table. "I call it 'RakSee.'" The device bristled with solder and wire. A square on its face glowed green. "When it's near anyone touched by the Signal, it turns red and screams." He picked it up and pushed it at her face. "That's how I knew I could let you in."

Donna stared at the little green square.
That cinches it. He's a nut.
All the same, she smiled and nodded and took abundant notes as he showed her his Signal Spotter and Hub Map and eventually, on acoustic guitar, a three-chord song called "The End."

As soon as she could do so politely, she put down the sticky pen and tore off her notes. "Thank you, Mister Nair." She pulled on her jacket. "My editor will be very interested in this."

"Do you have everything you need?"

"More than enough."

He opened the door for her. In the fading daylight, itchy and shaky and tired, she shuffled out of his slippers and into her heels. "Thank you," she said. "This is important. This is going to change everything."

"Be careful," he said. "You won't know who's on their side."

~

Donna descended a carpet of crunching leaves through the woods and out of sight. The air was sweet with pine and incoming rain. At the main road, she leaned against an oak and fiercely scratched one instep with her fingers. She pulled out her mobile, unlocked it, but dialed no number. "I'm out," she told it. "Pick me up."

Before long, a green Jeep Cherokee with tinted windows rumbled around the bend and pulled onto the shoulder for her. She climbed in the passenger side, locked the doors, and scooted into the empty driver's seat. On the dashboard lay a vial of crystal and a glass pipe–her payment.

"Call it off," she said. "He's no threat."

A Yoruba-accented male voice filtered from the stereo speakers. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." With ink-stained hands, Donna filled the pipe from the vial. "He's months from cracking the network. By then he'll be too late."

"What if he gets help?"

"He won't. He's not going to convince anyone." She lit the pipe and took a hit, lolling her head against the seat back. "Lucky for us."

"Lucky for him. Well done, Ms. Wilkins."

On the hill above the cabin, a hunter in a leafy yellow ghillie suit shoved up from his belly. He shook his head at Prajit's tin-foil-covered windows. What a waste of adrenaline. At least it paid the same. The hunter rubbed sensation back into his elbows and plucked his rifle off its stand.

In the Jeep, Donna tucked her feet cross-legged and reclined the seat a click. The next hit rounded out the high–the bubble, the zero–clean and reliable. "Mr. Adebayo," she said, "Are we the bad guys?"

Her partner paused a long, crackling moment. "Do you feel like a bad guy, Ms. Wilkins?"

"No." Donna checked her teeth in the rearview mirror. They were neat and white and beautiful. "I feel saved."

The Jeep roared to life and piloted itself toward the city. For appearances, Donna cocked a hand on the steering wheel.

~

In his cabin, Prajit peeled up a corner of tin foil to peer into the gathering dusk. No Donna. No headlights. No hard feelings. Who's to say, in her shoes, he wouldn't have chosen the same? You really can't judge a book by its cover. She was very sweet to sit through that song.

He switched his desktop monitors to the chimney feed, opening a three-screen panorama of woods painted psychedelic with infrared. Only trees. No hot spots bigger than a squirrel. He hung up his marker-stained bathrobe and smoothed down his hair. Switching off the RakSee's little green light, he tucked it on the BlueArc for safekeeping. It did its job perfectly.

Over a fresh cup of coffee, he settled at his workstation and scrubbed through footage from the road camera: the green Jeep, its license plate, Donna's ink-stained hand pulling the passenger door. In his custom GPS application, a round blip of Jeep merged onto the highway. Prajit unscrewed Donna's ball-point pen and squeezed the rest of the transmitter gel back in its vial. He must be close, if the Signal sent her. And now he was close to the Signal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tory Hoke writes, draws, and sweats in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, LORE, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and she has illustrated for Strange Horizons, Apex, and Eggplant Literary Productions' Spellbound anthology. Her Rare Words vocabulary comic updates weekdays at thetoryparty.com and on Twitter @toryhoke.