Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (38 page)

When? Why? What else might be in there?

David dived into the image files. He saw the defaults he remembered from childhood: Spike and the other pets. Then he saw the user-generated images—six versions of himself, at various ages. The youngest was a toddler; the oldest was pre-pubescent, about ten or eleven.

"The age at which I stopped being cute," he said bitterly.

He examined the dates on the files. They'd been loaded a decade ago, a couple of years after David left home for good.

"Did you like these better than me?" He glared at the white plastic box containing his mother. "So much more convenient, a hologram boy who never gets dirty, never gets ill, never gets to invite anyone over...."

Outrage filled him. His jaw clenched until his teeth ground together. The plastic box lay silently on the mantelpiece, an unsatisfactory focus for his anger.

"Two can play at this game," David muttered. He grabbed his phone, logged into his data archive, and searched through the picture tags.

He was embarrassed to discover how few pictures of his mother he possessed. But he selected the best one, and loaded it into the HoloMax. The green light blinked rapidly as the unit converted the 2D picture into a 3D hologram. A few seconds later, David's mother stood in front of him, wearing a summer dress and a straw hat. The picture had been taken long ago, on a rare trip to the seaside.

David remembered that day: he'd dashed up and down the beach, Spike bouncing along beside him, while his mother looked on from the promenade. Back then, David had been annoyed that she wouldn't walk to the end of Filey Brigg, and wouldn't let him go alone. Now, he found himself wondering how hard it had been for her to force herself away from the flat and go to the seaside at all, giving him a day out in the summer sun.

But he was still angry at being replaced by a hologram. He took off his sweater and tossed it on the floor. "Was I too untidy?" he shouted. Then he walked back and forth across the living room, grinding his shoes down into the carpet. "Did I spread too much dirt?" He emptied one of the boxes of junk onto the sofa, spilling brushes and dusters and air-fresheners across the upholstery. "Too much mess? Too much flesh and blood?"

The hologram said nothing, of course. It only watched, with sad grey eyes. His mother looked disconcertingly young—about David's own age. He'd been so used to thinking of her as the grown-up, the authority figure, that it was a shock to realize how young she'd been when he was born.

"Maybe I needed some company, sitting here alone after you'd left home," said the imagined voice in his mind.

Sullenly, David said, "You could have used Spike, or any of the defaults. You didn't have to program me in."

"I didn't want Spike: he was just a pet. I wanted you."

"Yeah, well, as you always used to say
—'I want doesn't get.'"
But David winced as he spoke, thinking of how rarely he'd visited, or even phoned.

"You've been saving that up to fling back at me, haven't you?"

David began to reply, then stopped. What was the point? It would only make him feel worse.

He went back to boxing up possessions. At least he knew that the HoloMax still worked. He didn't put it in the Charity box just yet, because he didn't want to unplug the unit. Even though it was only a hologram, switching his mother off felt too brutal.

David left the spilled trash for the time being. He cleared out the other rooms: the kitchen, Mum's bedroom, the study that had once been his own bedroom. By the time he finished, his arms ached and he felt emotionally numb from the barrage of seeing so many things familiar from childhood. Even the patterns on the kitchen plates triggered unexpected flashbacks to long-forgotten mealtimes.

He returned to the living room, and picked up the trash from the sofa. Eventually, you had to clear up your own mess. When he first lived alone, he'd learned that you could let things slide for a while, but not forever.

David carried all the boxes out to the van, grateful that his mother had lived on the ground floor. Then he returned to check whether he'd missed anything.

The flat looked bare and alien, stripped of everything personal that had turned it into a home. The hologram of his mother stood in the middle of the empty room, smiling as if having reached the apotheosis of tidiness.

It was time to unplug the HoloMax. David took a deep breath, summoning the strength to switch it off. Then he remembered the battery-powered remote projector. He retrieved the bracelet from its storage slot, and clipped it onto his left wrist. When he unplugged the main unit, his mother's image flickered briefly, then steadied as the auxiliary projector took over. Now the HoloMax could go into the van with everything else.

Jangling the house keys, David came back for a final look around. There was one last thing: the white plastic box on the mantelpiece. When he'd collected his mother's ashes from the crematorium that morning, he hadn't anticipated receiving them in such an ugly, functional container. He'd expected some kind of decorative urn. Apparently it was David's own responsibility to find a suitable final home for these mortal remains.

His mother had made a will, and specified cremation. That was no surprise: the tidy option. She wouldn't want to think of being buried—worms slithering over her decaying body; her flesh putrefying and rotting away.... No, cremation was much cleaner.

She hadn't specified what should be done with her ashes, but David was sure she'd envisaged them being kept in a vase on a shelf, to be dusted regularly. Every day. Cleanliness in death, as in life.

If he took the ashes home, then he would have to buy an urn for them, and put it somewhere, and keep it clean.... Yet was that really the best thing to do? It was in keeping with his mother's life—but what kind of a life had she lived, alone in her flat with the bleach and the HoloMax?

David had a better idea.

He picked up the plastic box, left the house, and locked the door. Instead of getting into the van, he walked briskly down the street. It was late afternoon, with autumn twilight setting in. The roar of rush-hour traffic sounded loud after the silence of the empty flat.

His mother's hologram trotted along behind him, projected by the bracelet. The HoloMax was designed for pets—it could display human images, but not the quirks of their personalities. For the first time he saw his mother walk over trash and dead leaves without flinching, almost as if learning to tolerate the outdoors.

As David reached the entrance to Valley Gardens, drizzle set in. He kept walking, past the shrubs and faded flowerbeds. Here the trees were more exotic, their fallen leaves dazzling in drifts of red and gold.

Beyond lay the Pinewoods, where the neat tarmac paths ended. Muddy trails led through the forest. His mother would never have come here in life. Her hologram braved the elements regardless—her summer clothes looking incongruous in the rain, her straw hat undisturbed by gusts of wind.

The forest smelled deep and rich, a cocktail of fresh pine and damp earth. David arrived at the wood's northern edge. When he emerged from the trees, he saw a panoramic view across Nidderdale. Even on a gloomy November afternoon, the vista was breathtaking.

"This is the first time you've been out in years," David said to the hologram standing beside him. "Look how beautiful it is. See, it can't hurt you. You've been missing so much." He pointed across the valley, gesturing from west to east. "Beamsley Beacon, Simon's Seat, Brimham Rocks, Fountains Abbey, Ripley Castle, the White Horse of Kilburn..." There were many more landmarks, but he couldn't remember them all. Even in this one corner of Yorkshire, the landscape was full of history.

"It's too late for me now," her imagined voice replied.

"It's not too late," David said. "Come on, just a little bit further." He smiled ruefully as he recognized the incongruity of chivvying the hologram onward, when he wore its projector on his wrist.

Other people were walking along the trail and admiring the view. He needed a little more privacy, so he cut across into the new plantation that extended down the slope. Here, the path was merely a long chain of puddles reflecting the clouds. Soon, David and his mother were surrounded by saplings: waist-high tangles of holly, their leaves a startling green; shoulder-high oaks, too young to produce acorns; slender willows reaching above their heads.

David opened the plastic box that he'd been carrying all this way. He blinked at his first sight of the ashes inside. They were as grey as the vaulting sky. He reached in with his bare hand, and shivered as he touched his mother's last remains. The texture was like coarse sand. With a convulsive jerk, he threw a handful of ashes down into the mud.

"It's only dirt," he said, his voice muffled by the tension in his throat. "It won't kill you...."

He delved into the box again. He'd intended to sprinkle the contents gently, reverently. But he found himself flinging the ashes onto the ground around the saplings: into the puddles, into the thick black mud, into the grass and toadstools and dead leaves. All the pent-up anger of his childhood went into each throw.

Beside him, the hologram looked on, the image growing dim in the twilight. It flickered, wavering like a windblown candle. David wondered what was happening, until he realized that his mother had only operated the HoloMax inside the flat; she'd never used the remote projector. The battery hadn't been replaced since his childhood.

"Goodbye, Mum," he whispered.

David's cheeks were wet, either from the drizzle or from his tears. Reaching deep in side the container for the last few handfuls, he cast them wide, in great arcs. He upended the box onto a holly sapling, gifting it with the final smudge of ash. Then he grabbed a cluster of holly leaves and squeezed tightly, hugging the pain to himself as the sharp spines pricked his palm, and blood began to trickle onto the damp black earth.

The hologram quivered, its edges softening, the image dissolving into air.

"I'm sorry! I'm so sorry...."

And he couldn't tell whether the voice was his mother's, or his own.

THE MONSTER'S SONNET

—Jack O'Brien
| 84 words

Let me not to the making of new minds
Admit impediment. Thought is not thought
Which falters because it blasphemy finds
Or pitchforked peasants come hence unsought.

O no! It is an ever-fixed eye
That looks on corpses and is not shaken.
It steals Promethean fire from the sky
While the super-man yet lies unwakened.

The future's come, its livid lips and brow
Have been created in the doctor's lab;
Let Frankenstein declare victory now
And sling another body on the slab.

Though I was born of mad Victor's lightning,
It's ignorance you should find more frightening.

CREATURE COMFORTS

—Lou Ella Hickman
| 70 words

it was just a patch
of red skin in the web of my left hand
then
from scratching
it soon
became like a scale from monstrous fish
drink more water, I thought
someone sent lotion for my birthday
unknowing, of course
my embarrassment
but the patch grew
worried, I would sweep a glance
at the hall mirror
my face hurt or so it seemed
(winter can be so unkind)
more water, I thought...
one morning when I woke
I flicked my forked tongue to taste the air

The Phantom Navigator In Stasis

—Robert Frazier
| 88 words

I dreamt last cycle of Mandalay station
Made of inky fins & blinking ports
A packet rife with babble