False Hearts (3 page)

*   *   *

Officer Oloyu follows me from the interrogation room to the hovercar, and we rise and fly along the coast of the bay toward my apartment in Inner Sunset. The last thing I want to do is see more of him, and I wonder why a senior policeman is taking the time to chauffeur me back instead of some rookie. I haven’t seen any other police officers except for the two who took Tila away—it’s almost as if they don’t want anyone else to see me.

I ignore Oloyu and stare out the window. It’s full night by now, and San Francisco glitters below us. The sight of it helps me forget my anxiety and terror, at least for a moment.

I love this city. It’s the complete opposite of Mana’s Hearth. In the Hearth, the lake is ink-black at night. In San Francisco, the algae farms make the bay glow green. To my right is Angel Island, and the ruined Alcatraz, the building too decayed by the salt and wind to visit, and the man-made islands where the rich live in their sumptuous houses. The Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge lead toward the city skyline. Billboards advertising Sudice products flash their garish colors: implant upgrades, a new Zeal lounge downtown, the virtual reality center next to Union Square Mall. The car passes between buildings: greenhouse skyscrapers with their lush, forest-like interiors, multi-level apartment towers, most of the windows lit, small silhouettes staring out the windows toward the bay.

Scattered throughout the city are revenants risen from the Earth after the Great Quake of 2055—antiquities of architecture preserved and joined with their modern counterparts in a hybrid of old and new: Coit Tower, the skyscrapers on California Street and near the Embarcadero, the old iconic Ferry Building at the base of the newly built air hangars above and the piers jutting out into the gentle waves of the bay. And there, just coming into sight, the TransAm Pyramid, twice as large as the old Transamerica Pyramid. I can’t look away from the glowing top floor, home to Club Zenith.

San Francisco.

Our new home after we’d left the Hearth. At first, we’d hated it. It was too different, too new, and we’d had to learn about its ways while struggling with our newly separated status. Eventually, we’d grown to love it. The freedom it gave us. The opportunities. Now, I fear I’ll grow to hate it again.

Officer Oloyu clears his throat. I turn to him, trying to bring something approximating a smile to my face, but it fails.

“I’ll tell you a little about the case,” he says, grudgingly. “I’ve been given the go-ahead by my superior.”

Why the change? “All right,” I say, slowly. The flashing lights of the city play across his face, catching in his eyes.

“You are not permitted to share this information with anyone. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“The victim has not been formally identified yet, but another hostess says they called him Vuk. He was tall, muscular, wore a sharp suit. Tipped very well. Spent a lot of time in the Zeal lounge. Tila was one of his favorites.”

“Vuk,” I say, tasting the name on my lips. The retinal display of my implants tells me the name means “wolf” in Serbo-Croatian. I send the text away. “Why are you telling me this?”

“We want you to come back in tomorrow,” he says. The hardness has left him again. I prefer him without it—it doesn’t suit him. Too forced.

“Why?”

“You’ll see. Please come to the station tomorrow at 0900. Take the MUNI. Come through the back entrance.”

“This is not a request?”

“No.” We’ve reached my apartment. He sets the hovercar down on the balcony. I sigh at the sight of my broken sliding glass door. At least the worst of the rain has stopped.

I get out without saying goodbye, stepping into my damp living room. I turn around, watching Oloyu lift the police car away.

“Vuk,” I say again. “Who were you?” A rich man, if he frequented the club, who liked to plug into the Zeal virtual world fantasies. I can just see a Sudice billboard for Zeal, flashing through the fog. A woman in a Chair, wires hooked up to her arms and temples, eyes closed, a smile on her face. Above her head, her dreams come to life—she’s clad in armour, and fighting a sinuous monster. The billboard blinks again. She’s flipping head over feet, wearing a skintight star-spangled uniform, an Olympic athlete. One last blink, and the tagline:
Find your Zeal for life. What will you dream today?

What were Vuk’s dreams when he was plugged into that Chair, and did Tila join him in them?

I look down over the city again, wondering how I’ll find out who he was and how he entangled Tila in this mess.

THREE

TILA

They’ve given me an old-fashioned paper notebook to write my last will and testament, with a pencil blunt enough I can’t kill myself with it. I’m sure I still could, if I wanted to.

I refused a tablet. I don’t want them sneaking and reading this as I write. So here I am, with my paper and pencil. I’m more used to this than most people in the city—out in the Hearth, there are no fancy gadgets and very little technology.

I’m not going to write my last will and testament. What’s the point? I don’t have much to leave and my only next of kin is Taema, so everything goes to her. I couldn’t send any of my stuff to my parents at the Hearth even if I wanted to, since we’re apostate and all that.

So I’m just sort of scribbling, seeing what will come out. It passes the time, I guess. There’s nothing else to do. The cell is cold and boring, with everything gray and beige, though I do have a window that shows a tiny patch of blue sky. Maybe writing this will distract me, at least a little, from the fact they’re going to kill me soon.

There’s no point sugar-coating it—it’ll happen. My lawyer is half heartedly trying to put up a defense, buy me more time, but I don’t know why he bothers. The trial’s in a few weeks. Though can you really call it a trial if there’s no jury, just some judge deciding your fate? The government is keeping it all hush-hush. The media aren’t meant to know—most of the people here don’t even know who I am or what I’m meant to have done. I overheard the guards talking about it. I’m not in a normal prison. They don’t even have prisons in San Francisco anymore, there’s so little crime. I’m locked away somewhere else, but we didn’t travel long so I think I’m still in Northern California. Maybe they took me to the Sierras? The air seems colder and crisper.

If it ever does get out, I wonder if they’ll let me read the news feeds. They’ll call me all sorts of names. Some will be true. Some won’t.

The judge will say I’m a criminal, and then they’ll put me in stasis. Freeze me like a popsicle, and then I might as well be dead. That sounds flippant, I know, but that seems to be the only way I can write about it without crying.

Shit, never mind. There’s tear stains on the paper now.

Putting people in stasis is Pacifica’s answer to capital punishment. They’re not killing them, but cryogenically freezing criminals. It happened a lot more in the early days of Pacifica, after the United States split up. Now, maybe only a dozen people, tops, are put into stasis every year. It’s only for the really hopeless cases, those who don’t respond to Zeal therapy and will never be redeemed. I guess they think I’m unredeemable.

Hardly anyone who goes into stasis comes back out. It does happen—some tireless lawyer will discover someone frozen was actually innocent. They come out of it, disoriented, to find years have passed them by. One woman was taken out after thirty years. Her husband and mother were gone, most of her friends had moved away. She ended up committing suicide, because she felt the rest of her life she got back wasn’t worth living.

How would I react if I was frozen and woke up in fifty years to discover Taema was old and frail, or gone entirely?

I don’t really have to worry about it, though. People coming out of stasis has only happened a handful of times in forty years. Not good odds.

Then there are the outages. Whole wings of people in stasis losing power, and they die before anyone can fix it. So convenient, right? The government always claims it’s an accident. They promise to install a back-up server. Then they never do. One day, I’m pretty sure there’ll be an outage on everyone in stasis. Whoops. Away they go.

Thinking about living without Taema has weirded me out. I can’t get it out of my head. I’m alone in this cell, and my sister’s miles away. I’m still not used to being alone, even ten years after we separated. Tomorrow is our surgery anniversary. Whoo. The first sixteen years of my life were spent looking over my sister’s shoulder, or resting cheek-to-cheek with her to look at someone together.

I wonder sometimes if I started on this road as soon as they took the knife to us. She’s my better half, Taema. She’s the one with the sensible head on her shoulders, who would talk me out of doing stupid shit as kids because she didn’t want to be drawn into my trouble. She was usually drawn in anyway, though. It’s not like she had much of a choice.

If the news does get out, she’ll have to dodge paparazzi drones left and right—how many alleged murderers have an identical twin they were once conjoined with?
And
grew up in that crazy cult in the redwoods across the bay? They’ll have a field day. At least she’s not here in the cell with me, and she’s not going into stasis
when
if I do, so that’s something.

Ugh. I’m almost tempted to crumple this whole thing up and flush it down the toilet. I’m not stupid. Even though this is paper, they can read whatever I write on here and they’re going to rake through it with a fine-tooth comb to see what I’m trying to hide. When I’m in the shower or something, they’ll sneak in here and read it.

WON’T YOU, ASSHOLES?

It’s a waste of time. I might as well tell you now. There’s not going to be any confession in here. Don’t hold your breath.

The guards just dropped off my food. Boring meals of algae and vat-grown meat. The guards seem to like the look of me. Men always do. Plenty of women as well. But then their eyes drop to my chest, to the white scar against my brown skin, peeking over the collar of my prison uniform. They can’t hide their fear at what it represents: that I am only half of who I used to be.

*   *   *

I’ve just been sitting here the last few hours, trying to think of what to write next. It’s dusk outside now, and the stars are coming out one by one in that little patch of sky by the window. It reminds me of the fireflies Taema and I used to chase in Mana’s Hearth when we were little. We were good at catching them. We walked sideways then, like the lake crabs, but we never slowed each other down. One of us would reach out and sweep the fireflies into jars, take them back to the house to light our bedroom, and let them out a few hours later. I miss those days.

It was after I left the Hearth I learned the fireflies had only recently come to California, introduced to the area a few years after the Great Upheaval. How strange, that if that hadn’t happened, those memories wouldn’t have existed.

Out there, I think Taema has been trying to help. The lawyer’s dropped a couple of hints. Plus, I know her. Obviously. She’s not going to sit around, playing with her VivaFog machines, waiting for me to die. Or basically die.

She’ll be trying to follow a trail, to piece together what happened. I hope she doesn’t, and that the trail goes cold. I don’t want her to find out what I did that I shouldn’t have, and what I didn’t do that I should have. How I lost my innocence while she still has hers—but she might have to lose it, if she wants to save me.

Yep, that’s cryptic as hell. But remember: no confessions. Not from me.

Since I’m not going to write my last will and testament, and I’m not going to confess, I figure maybe I’ll write a different sort of testament, or a different kind of confession. It won’t be a beautiful story. Taema has a way with words, not me. She’s the thinker, following the rules, lost in her machines and books. I’m the unpredictable artist, always wanting to do things on the spur of the moment. Guess that’s why I’m here now.

I don’t even know who I’m writing to. The general masses, maybe, if this somehow leaks to the press. Or maybe I’m writing to my sister.

So this is the story of Taema and me, the life we had. Maybe, while writing it, I’ll figure out where it all went wrong.

FOUR

TAEMA

The first thing I do when I’m home is turn on the bots to clear up all the broken glass and to dry the carpets. I order a new door from the replicator, which will be ready by the morning, and draw the curtains against the breeze.

Everything’s been searched. They haven’t trashed the place, but so many things are not quite where they should be, and the whole apartment has the aura of being manhandled.

I turn music up loud in my auditory implants and try to set it to rights. I help the bots clean. I throw out the meal I spent all afternoon making, my appetite gone. I order a NutriPaste from the replicator and force the tasteless goop down my throat to keep my blood sugar even. I focus on cleaning with every fiber of my being, the pulse of the beats of scrubbing driving out all thought.

When everything is perfect again, I can no longer deceive myself.

I stand in the middle of my silent, spotless kitchen. My eyes snag on the cookie jar on the counter.

Tila and I have keys to each other’s places, of course. Our schedules have always been different—I work the standard nine to three, whereas Tila works nights. When we meet for dinner, it’s actually closer to her breakfast. When she first moved out eight months ago, I found it really difficult, and I wasn’t good at hiding it. I felt betrayed. When we fight, we know the perfect way to wound the other, but it’s like hitting a mirror—the glass cuts us just as deeply.

After that first, terrible fight, she left me an apology note in the cookie jar. Problem is, she eats more cookies than I do, so it took me three or four days to find the note. It worked, and I forgave her, not that I can ever stay mad at her for long. Over the next few weeks, she kept leaving notes in the cookie jar, dropping them off on the way to work for me to find on the way home. They were silly, full of in-jokes and puzzles. Then when she started acting more distant, working more hours at the club, they stopped. I haven’t even checked the cookie jar in days.