Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014 (16 page)

I winced. "Old program from the Before
. The Flying Nun.
One of my clients loves old TV
. My Mother the Car. My Favorite Martian. Hogan's Heroes.
"

"I sort of remember that one."

"A comedy set in a Nazi concentration camp."

"Ugh." She took a good look around then, the beat-up, period furniture, the static prints on the walls, the light slowly dawning in her eyes. She stared up at a pair of Klee drawings on either side of the fireplace—
The Poet and His Wife.
"This is the house we grew up in."

I nodded. She'd never visited.

"What's it like living here alone?"

"Wonderful."

She shook her head. That was enough about me.

"Aren't you curious?" she said. "About Peter?"

"I thought you guys were doing Woodstock together." I wondered how many Woodstocks she'd done. "I didn't think people were monogamous at Woodstock?"

"Of course we aren't! It's an acid mud orgy!"

"Then what's the problem?"

"Two timing. He's living parallel so he can be with Monica, and me, at the same time."

I'd guessed something like this. My conversations with Peter had been strangely out of sync over the last few years. Parallelism isn't popular among the working class. The surcharges were prohibitive. Leasing two bodies cost ten times more than leasing one. Leasing three, one hundred. The Zeitgeist enjoyed diversity, to a degree. Thank God.

Monica had been Jean's maid of honor. It had always been complicated with the three of them.

The doorbell rang.

"I don't want to see him. Ever." The tone of voice was familiar. She meant it.

"I'll tell him to go home."

They could sort this out later. Somewhere else.

Peter looked exhausted. Hands in the pockets of his jeans. The tattered leather bomber jacket, a recreation of one he'd worn in college. He managed his trademark half smile.

"She's here, isn't she?" he asked.

"Go home, Peter."

"I need to see her."

I felt Jean behind me. I turned.

She clutched my butcher's knife in one small white-knuckled hand.

I sighed as she shoved past me.

Peter didn't even take his hands out of his pockets.

"Oh, come on," he managed. He looked down at the knife handle protruding from his tie-dyed T-shirt. The blade was buried somewhere in or near his heart. Crimson bloomed, erasing the shirt's cheerful, chaotic pattern.

"Very immature," he murmured. The color drained from his face.

"Fuck you, Peter." Jean said. She twisted the knife, which sent a jet of blood splattering across her face and chest.

He fell to his knees, his eyes rolling back in his head. I lowered him to the ground. I checked his pulse. He was gone. I pulled the knife from his chest, grating against bone. I'd have to get a new one. Or erase these memories.

We went back to the living room. I set the dripping knife on a magazine on the coffee table. Jean was crying. She was an ugly crier. Snot, red eyes, everything.

I sat on a footrest and took her hands in mine. "It's over," I said. I hoped it was.

She nodded, unable to speak.

"I'll make tea." Tea was my answer to this kind of thing. It took a few minutes to make. It was harmless. I wouldn't have to watch her cry, which frankly was painful. Appropriate for the mid-morning. Tea it was.

"Chamomile?"

She nodded.

I left her in the living room, washed the blood off my hands, filled a kettle with water from the tap and set it on the burner. It took a minute or so for the water to boil and the kettle to sing. I usually enjoyed that wasted, nothing minute.

House whispered in my ear this time.

"It's Peter. Again."

House had the good sense not to chime out loud this time. I didn't enjoy driving, or cities, so I'd picked a suburban place close to a spawn point, a small subdivision straight out of the late seventies, split level ranch houses with aluminum siding. I'd had mine built at the end of a cul-de-sac in the rolling hills of what had been central New York, in the Before.

While I was trying to figure out what to say to Peter in private message there was a pounding at the door. I turned off the burner.

"I'll get it," I hurried from the kitchen and opened the door halfway.

Peter stood looking down at his body, frowning.

"I need to talk to her," he said.

"Later. That one didn't get more than a sentence out."

"I have to try," he said. He looked miserable. More miserable than the body at his feet.

I turned to see Jean standing behind me again. This time she had a cleaver. She slipped by me.

I'm not a big fan of graphic violence. I try to avoid it when I can. I took a step back as she swung the cleaver in a gleaming arc at Peter's neck. I closed my eyes.

Unpleasant sounds. Gurgling. Splashing. A falling body.

"Leave me alone!" Jean sobbed.

I opened my eyes. The porch was a mess, Peter's second body slumped over his first.

"You have to say that before you kill him," I said gently. "Remote backups aren't that fast or that granular. You'll have to talk to him. Let it sink in. Give him a minute, let the memory sync. Then you can kill him. Otherwise he's going to keep coming."

Jean shook her head. "The bodies. He can see the bodies."

She had a point. He would see the bodies.

I sighed. "Do you want to talk? I can listen. It's my job."

"I'm not your client!" she sneered. "I'm not a toady. I'm an actress."

"You're an extra!" I snapped. "You're window dressing!"

I took a breath. It was a stupid time to have this argument. We'd each been given a number of choices upon revival. We didn't like the choices the other had made. We'd never liked each other's choices.

"I'm going to go do some work. Let me know if you want to talk. About anything."

I went back to the sofa and resumed
The Flying Nun,
trying to understand what the hell had possessed a bunch of grown-ups to make such a thing. It wasn't easy. Sometimes, I wished my client were a little more neurotypical.

A Shareholder, Gharlane was the only person I knew that had never been archived; his consciousness was continuous with the Before. The Zeitgeist had decided, as it had evolved during the Nanocalpyse, that people in debt must not be worth much. It had archived them as stable, but inactive, data structures, rather than let them continue to waste system resources.

Thank God, in the words of Richard Feynman, there was
Plenty of Room at the Bottom,
in which we could be cheaply stored.

Back when we bought computers, when they were like appliances instead of dissolved in our bloodstreams, remember how you never got around to throwing any of your old files away? How each new disk swallowed the older disk whole, with plenty of room to spare?

Gharlane had brought me back. My work for him, as a professional Friend, had resurrected our circle of deadbeats, Jean and Peter included.

I didn't appreciate Jean biting the hand that had resurrected her. But she'd always been like that. Dissatisfied with birthday and Christmas gifts. Angry at the state school Mom and Dad could afford to send us to, back in the day. Furious at every "modeling" gig that turned out to be handing out snack food samples in front of subway stations. The world owed her something, and it never, ever delivered.

The doorbell rang about every fifteen minutes. Sometimes he got in a sentence or two, shouted, but it always ended abruptly. This was costing a fortune. I didn't know how much extras made, but if Jean's constant demands for loans were any indication it wasn't much.

Each of those bodies cost somewhere around ten thousand dollars. Ten hours of Friendship if I ended up footing the bill. Ten hours of
The Flying Nun. My Mother the Car. Hogan's Heroes. Kamen Rider. Thunderbirds. Flipper. The Star Wars Christmas Special.

At some point, he'd max out his credit and stop coming. Archived, until someone paid his way out of dead storage.

Around noon, I tried to put an end to it.

I gently pulled the bloody cleaver from her hand as she gazed down at her latest victim. There were somewhere between twenty and thirty bodies scattered over my front lawn. She was streaked with dried blood. She'd washed her face and glasses a few times, but hadn't changed or showered. Her hair hung in long bloody dreads.

"Come on, Carrie. Get yourself cleaned up. I'll kill him for you, this time."

She looked up at me, biting her lip. "You'd do that for me?"

"Sure," I lied.

I waited for Peter to show up while she showered. I didn't know what I was going to say. Gharlane called, and I told him I was having a family crisis. He gave me that look, the fake sympathy look, said the right things. Gharlane emulated most of his humanity, what they used to call Asperger's autism, back in the Before. A few dozen like him had brokered the Compact with the Zeitgeist after the nanocalapyse. Human beings smart enough for the Zeitgeist to consider equals, and wealthy enough for them to negotiate with.

The Zeitgeist was big on intellectual property rights.

Jean and I sat together at the kitchen table. Doesn't matter how nice your living room is, your family room, your dining room, everyone always sits around the kitchen table. Jean had ditched the sixties and was wearing khakis and a T-shirt from her backpack. An absurdly happy bunny leered from the T-shirt with the words "It's all about me," above in neon pink type.

I sipped my tea. Oolong.

"Okay. So Peter was cheating on you with Monica?"

"In spirit. They swapped memory cores." Jean said.

"Oh," I winced. Not good.

"Look, I don't want to set you off, but how is that worse than porn? Or morn, I mean." Morn, morph porn, which had been big, before the Discontinuity. In that last year, social media feeds were littered with explicit ads starring you and whatever celebrity or historical figure your filter thought would amuse you. Friends told me they'd seen themselves bonking Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Gandhi, Einstein. Nobody ever admitted clicking on the things, but they were making money. Somebody must have bought it.

"This isn't morn. This is real. He is really screwing Monica. Right now."

"You're not monogamous, though, are you? How is this different from your, ah, other performances?"

"It just is."

I nodded. I did understand was the thing.

"We just got our license," she said quietly, looking at her feet. "For a child. Eight months ago."

"Oh," I said.

"We were out of our minds with joy. I thought we were. At first. But something didn't feel right. I drone tailed him to a coffee shop, saw the two Peters together. They made chit chat. Exchanged memory cores. I followed the other one home, someplace that looked like the fifties. He kissed her at the front door. I found the memory cores in his underwear drawer. He
remembers
her."

"Were you pregnant? Are you pregnant?"

"I don't want to talk about it," she said.

So we didn't. I made us some food, a pair of Hungry-Man TV dinners in the foil tin which take an hour to heat up properly in the gas oven. They're not done until the mashed potatoes look all melted and fused. Afterward, we drank Jack Daniels, and listened to some Vinyl. Prog rock, from the Before. I didn't think she'd be drinking if she was pregnant. Of course, she could have archived the pregnancy. She didn't say a word for a half hour or so.

"I miss the Before."

I shrugged. I felt the same way most of the time, but coming from her it sounded pathetic. "You're romanticizing. You were a college drop out. Your plays were flops. You were waiting tables at the end, bumming money off of Mom and Dad."

The booze was getting me down. I didn't drink, but somehow, it had seemed the thing to do. "We got old enough to know... we were never going to change the world."

"Then the world changed."

"Yeah."

"I miss Mom and Dad."

I didn't bring up the fact they always fought. I just nodded. The emerging Zeitgeist hadn't archived San Francisco; there had been factions, in the beginning, who had disagreed about our absolute worth.

"I miss people, a world with just people. The world where people were on top."

"We were never on top, Sis."

She nodded. We didn't speak for a long time. The vinyl spun and the Lamb Lied Down on Broadway.

"Why?" she asked.

"Why what?"

"Why did he mess us up?"

"Men make mistakes," I said, deftly controlling the urge to mention the times she'd been on the other side of this kind of thing.

Jean's relationships never ended well. Actually, now that I thought about it, nobody's relationships ended well. Even the ones that didn't end seemed scary to me half the time.

"You could try changing teams."

"Become gay?"

"If you're sick of men, yeah."

She made a face.

"Using a mod! I'm not talking about willpower! Geez." "You're a man. Would you do that? What Peter did?"

I shrugged. "I did things. When I was younger, in the Before. Young people are all half crazy." We'd both been middle aged at the discontinuity. Everybody was young, now, in body, but somehow, it wasn't really like being young again. You knew too much.

Jean shoved her tea away, slopping it over the table. I sighed, getting up to get a sponge. "It takes two people to screw up a relationship, you know. It's never just one person. Have you considered—"

I turned, sponge in hand. Jean, her face a mask of fury, swung the cleaver at my face. "—couples therapy—" I closed my eyes. I don't like violence. Especially when it's directed at me.

I blinked, suddenly sober, in the assembler booth at the spawn point. My interface, the discrete row of icons in my peripheral vision which I generally had set to auto-hide, indicated I'd just deleted two minutes of short term memory. I'd never been murdered, after the discontinuity, anyway. Never played war games. Never done immersive theater. I was wearing that disposable orange thing, the one that looks like a prison jumper.

I punched a new set of clothes into the nanomat, changed in the rest room, and headed home. I ambled from street light to street light through the summer night, in no hurry to get back to the drama. A sports car blew past blaring dance club music I didn't recognize. Dance music pretty much all sounded the same to me, over a century of it. I'd always loved walking—hadn't even gotten a driver's license until I was thirty. It made dating difficult, before I'd moved to the city.