Coda (3 page)

“Wow!” Omega exclaims, running up to the nearest viewer. “This is cool!”

“It’s not even doing anything,” Alpha says. “Ant, what’s it for?”

“Quiet, okay? I’ll show you,” I say. Their voices are a little too loud in a place that demands respect for its inhabitants. Right. Left. Along the stack. Five lockers in from the end, three from the top.

Citizen T25641, otherwise known as my mother, is contained in
a memory chip on a block of foam behind the glass door. Unlike ID chips, which are implanted at birth, the Corp waits a few years before putting these in. My mother’s memories start at about age three—so do mine—but I doubt there’s anything interesting to see before that, anyway. I barely remember waking up from the surgery. The day the twins came home from theirs is clearer. I looked at the bandages over their ears and pictured the chips inside, their dual function of recording memories and ensuring maximum receptiveness to the music. Back then, I was still naïve enough to believe those were both good things.

When I come alone, I take a minute to remember her as clearly as I can, a luxury Alpha and Omega don’t have. Once again, I pass my wrist in front of a sensor—this one will only work for a family member or a Corp master chip—and the door swings open on its hinges.

“What do you want to see?” My fingers run over sharp corners as I carry the chip to the nearest viewer.

“When we were little,” says Alpha. Beside her, Omega nods in agreement.

I smile. “You’re still little.”

“Am not!”

“Shhhh.”

The screen comes to life as soon as I slide the chip into the slot on the side of the tower. There, in white text on a blue background I’m sure is meant to be soothing, is a menu of my mother’s life. Or most of it.

The whole benevolence thing would be a lot easier to swallow if the Corp didn’t edit the memories after death. They say it’s to protect the living from things we don’t want to learn about our loved ones. I’m sure it sounds like a reasonable explanation to them.

Organized by date, type, location, and finally by who else the memories contain, my mother is reduced to a list, a catalog. I scroll until I find a day in the park before she really started to go downhill.

“Ready?” They both nod, eager and awed. I select the final option. A halo of lights blooms above the pedestal and then the holograph appears. Compiled and extrapolated from both her thoughts and what the Corp knew about her, the translucent image is an outside view of her holding the twins, round-faced toddlers, while my father and I watch from a few feet away. Like a muted TV, there’s no sound. I don’t ask if they can remember her laugh.

I look so young, and I’m ashamed, now, of the scowl on my face.

Knowing stuff I didn’t then, I can see signs of the illness that eventually gets all of us: dull eyes, yellowed skin, bones prominent beneath not enough flesh. But she’s smiling. The twins had been unexpected, later in life than most people risk. They’d given her a temporary energy she hadn’t shown in a while.

I pull Omega’s hand back. “Don’t touch.”

“She’s so pretty,” Alpha whispers.

“She was. You look like her.”

Our hologram selves sit down on the grass and my mother pulls food from a bag. I smile, knowing what’s coming next, and laugh outright when, beside me, Alpha punches Omega in the arm.

“You stole my cookie!”

“Eat faster next time.” He sticks his tongue out at her.

“You get your revenge, Al. Here,” I say, grinning as I skip ahead a few days to a scene at the kitchen table and Alpha dumping an entire bowl of noodles over Omega’s head. They hang down to his collar, and my mother is torn between chastising Alpha and laughing.

“I look good with long hair,” Omega muses, straight-faced, and they both collapse into giggles.

We stay until it’s dark outside the high windows and we’ve watched every kind-of-happy memory I can find that contains the twins. More days in the park, family dinners. She was a much better cook than I am. I tell them everything I can remember and indulge faint daydreams of introducing Haven to her. They would’ve liked each other.

“Tell you what,” I say, the last memory I can show them fading from the viewer, “why don’t you guys go hide and I’ll find you, like we do in the park? Just stay on this floor.”

They run off, smiling, in different directions as I pretend to count to a hundred. My fingers tap through menus for something I’ve watched too many times.

She’s a ghost of herself in this one, gaunt and faded and weak, white as the pillows she’s propped against.

“Promise me, Anthem.”

I say nothing.

“They need you. They will need you. Promise me they’ll always come first, that you’ll keep them safe. And promise you won’t ever make someone watch this happen to you, the way you’re all watching me.”

My younger self squints. I remember the tears, the way they burned.

Bony fingers grip mine with surprising strength.
“Promise!”

I’m already breaking the first one.

“Lunchtime.” Wafts of something hot and unappetizing and nutritionally balanced come into the cubicle with Tango. She moves behind my head to de-jack me so I can eat.

“Good book?” she asks. When I can turn my head, I look at her, see her eyes darting between me and the doorway.

“Interesting.” Actually, my mind’s been wandering for a while, occupied with my plans for later. It’s Wednesday.

“You were humming,” she whispers, stepping away to grab the edge of the cart and slide my food over.

Heat, then cold washes over my skin. I hadn’t even noticed. “Did anyone hear?”

“Just me, I think. Most of the sector’s empty until shift change. But you need to be more careful.”

If she only knew. “I will. Track from this morning must’ve stuck in my head.”

“Sure,” Tango agrees through thin lips. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

Fear makes my lunch tasteless—a blessing. I’m not usually so careless or stupid. There’s nothing the Corp punishes more cruelly than unauthorized music.
Unauthorized
being everything except the tracks they make available through the consoles we have at home, or the songs played at the clubs. No humming. No singing. I once saw someone pulled into a patrol-pod for whistling. As if we’d all give up tracking completely if unencoded music was around, as if our addictions wouldn’t sink their claws desperately deeper to pull us back.

Again, I think of the statue.

My book picks up where I left off, though I’ve lost the thread now. Wednesdays are the only day of the week I really look forward to, and the closer it gets to the end of work, the harder it is to concentrate. Today, I mostly focus on not making any sound; it’s not just me who will get in trouble if I’m heard.

“See you tomorrow, Anthem,” Tango says later, after helping me stand. Dizzy, exhausted, and disoriented, I find my way to an
elevator and I’m kept on my feet by the crush of other conduits leaving so the next shift can take over. I’m fortunate they let me work during the day, when the twins are at school.

“Usual?” asks the man in the store around the corner from headquarters.

“Yeah, thanks.” I wait while he maneuvers his prosthetic arm into a refrigerated case; a bottle of grape juice emerges held in a metal claw. A swipe of my wrist hurts my ears and debits a stupid number of credits from my account.

The trans-pod trip to Quadrant Two is long enough to allow the sugar to take effect and for me to daydream about Haven for a while. Feeling almost human again, I get off at my stop and walk a few quiet blocks.

The bottle rattles into a recycling container as I round the corner. My heart and feet stop in perfect unison; my eyes focus on the red cross, stark and bloody against the pristine white of the med-pod parked outside my building.

It can’t be. He was fine when I left him.

Sand fills my throat. Not today, please. It’s Wednesday. Any day but today. My boots hammer the sidewalk; my pulse races. I reach the steps the same moment the doors open; a tech backs out and looks over his shoulder to make sure the way is clear for the stretcher before he nods to his partner.

“Who—?” I swallow. “Who is that?” Wheels scrape against concrete; the covered body bounces and stills when they come to a stop beside me.

“Who wants to know, Citizen?”

I look at the med-tech by the body’s feet. “I live here.” The shapeless lump under the rubber sheet gives me no clues except maybe height. It could be. Blood thuds in my ears.

He shrugs, and the other tech flips back the sheet. Spots dance in front of my eyes; I blink them away to see that I’m allowed to breathe again. I’ve seen her around, this girl whose lips are naturally blue and whose skin is ghostly pale. She’s about my age, I think, but we’ve never spoken more than a greeting in the hallway. I know she lived alone, and that she was too young to die from whatever killed her—it can’t be tracking, not yet—and I’m sorry she’s gone, but I care who she isn’t more than who she is right now. I push past the stretcher, up the steps, scan my wrist, and take the stairs to my apartment three at a time. It could have been him, and I need to know.

The living room is quiet except for the TV and my father’s gentle snores. He’s fine, for a warped value of
fine
, anyway, and we all have that. Relief relaxes my muscles one by one as I stare at him.

We do okay without his help, me and the twins. Conduit pay gets them food, clothes, tracks and club cover for me so that the Corp sees I’m following the rules, staying high. If they come for me in the middle of the night, it won’t be because I haven’t been doing enough of their drugs.

It’ll be for something else, and as long as my father’s long, painful breaths continue, I can convince myself that Alpha and Omega won’t lose their whole family if I’m caught.

I change my clothes and ignore the call of the console. A track would really help right now, and my body is used to a hit at this time of day, but it’s Wednesday. Instead, I watch the news while I persuade my father to at least drink some water. There’s nothing new, just the usual announcements of songs that will be played at the clubs across the city and an interview with one of the Corp’s musicians.

They’re treated royally—all for the low, low price of agreeing to help enslave the rest of us.

“I’ll be home before the twins,” I say to my father. Alpha and
Omega spend afternoons with a friend whose mother needs the credits I give her.

I think he understands—a good day for him.

The green-haired singer is still on the TV, gushing about how great his studio is. If I ever see him in the lobby at work before he goes upstairs, I’ll be torn between restraining myself from hitting him and telling him how much I like his music. The guy’s talented.

So am I.

Scope meets me on a corner by the South Shore, our footsteps matching up without a pause. The vivid red streaks in his hair catch the light.

“You look wrecked, man.”

I laugh. “It’s my job, okay? I can deal.” He doesn’t need to know about my panic back at my apartment. Scope has it pretty easy. He finished school a couple of years ago, then trained as a chrome artist. Haven’s eyebrows are his handiwork, so I have him to thank for knowing her at all. His brother, Pixel, runs the club we go to most nights.

“Yeah, okay. How’s your father?”