Little Deadly Things (45 page)

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
MARCH 4, 2045

M
arta clung to Dana like a shipwreaked sailor might cling to a a rock. She turned to him and brushed a lock of hair out of his face and wiped tears from his cheek. She kissed his forehead, sobbed again, and then caught hold of herself. She struggled to regain her composure.

“We have to figure out how Eva started this,” she said.

“But there’s nothing here. What are we missing?” Dana asked.

Marta’s self-control cracked. “You mean besides everything that Eva destroyed? Besides that your father is dead? And probably mine? Other than that?” Now her voice was near hysteria. “If there’s some way to stop this disaster, she hid it too well.”

Dana’s head snapped up in sudden realization. “Hidden? Mom, I think I can find the key to Eva’s programming. Something she told me a long time ago about hiding things in plain sight. Come on, we’ve got to do this and then we can, well, whatever. Where is there a nanoscale microscope?”

Marta lumbered to her feet. She teetered and fell back. She grabbed for the edge of the desk but missed. She collapsed.

“Mom? Mom? Mom!” Dana reached down and touched the side of her neck. Her pulse was thready, her skin cold and clammy, her breathing shallow. Dana cradled her head in his lap and called out, “Somebody help! We need help! Link to Emergency Services. Please.”

Several NMech personnel rushed in and found Marta, prone, legs sprawled open, as if welcoming death as her lover. Dana knelt beside her and stroked her hair and face. His face was a map of fatigue and grief.

“What’s wrong?” a woman asked.

“Link to Emergency Services. Now.”

“Dana, they’re all out on emergency calls. Do you know what’s going on out there?”

“Listen,” Dana said to the woman. He subvocalized a holo display, inviting her to look. “Do you see what I’m prepared to send you? I’ll give you her doctor’s cloud data. Get hold of her doctor and get him here
now
or she’s going to die. Keep the money, share it with the doctor...whatever. But get medical help while there’s still time. Please,” he begged.

The woman took in the sum, ready to be transmitted. Her eyes widened for a moment and then fixed on Dana. Her voice was gentle. “Dana, there’s nobody to reach. The city is under martial law. Most of the country is. All medical personnel are at hospitals or with ambulances. I would do anything for your mother. But it’s impossible.”

Dana groaned. His cry built to a banshee’s wail.

A researcher at NMech burst through the door, a physician before joining NMech. “What’s going on? What happened to Dr. Cruz?”

Dana summarized crisply, “She’s thirty-six years old, severe JRA, and having an attack of MAS.” Then his voice cracked, “Please help my mom.”

“Okay, son. Let’s see what we have.” His voice was calm. Before Dana could move away, Marta reached with one hand and clutched his wrist. Though weakened, her grasp was enough to hold him fast. Dana bent down and put his ear to her mouth.

“Go...stop Eva. Nanoscope in my workspace. I love you, son, with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my might.”

“Mom, you’re going to be all right. Hold on. The doctor’s here.”

“Dana. Listen to me. You must go to El Yunque. Find Abuela. She’ll know what to do.”

“Mom, don’t talk like that. You’re going to be okay.”

Dr. Marta Cruz, bohique and researcher, mother and widow, the scientist credited with ending the Great Washout—or helping to start it, depending on the account—summoned her last reserve of strength. “Hijo! Promise me. Whatever happens, you must go to El Yunque. Promise me!”

Tears streamed down his cheeks. He bent down and embraced her. “Oh, Mama. I promise. But you have to promise me that you will live.”

Marta smiled. “I promise that I will love you always and my spirit will look after you.” She let go of his wrist and reached behind her neck. Clumsy fingers unfastened a string that held a small leather pouch to her breast.

“Dana, take this. You will find someone to wear it. Abuela can teach her, too.” Softly now, “Go to Abuela.”

Dana stared at his mother’s leather pouch. Marta’s voice trailed off, unintelligible now, a series of moans. She was semi-conscious. And then, silent.

The doctor pushed Dana out of the way, ripped apart Marta’s shirt and applied medical cloth to help regulate her vitals, a vain gesture that would do little more than rob the body of its modesty. Dana turned his eyes away from the sight of his mother’s torso. Too cheerful sunlight streamed in through the window, and reflected off the dull surfaces of Eva’s furniture. The shadow cast a gray pallor on Marta’s slack face. The color of life was gone.

___________________________________________

MY MOTHER

FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO

I
magine waking up every day with a stiff neck, unable to turn your head to the left or to the right. Imagine your back, legs, arms, hands, and hips, as stiff as a rubber toy left overnight in a snow bank. That was my mother’s every morning.

She never complained.

What would you do if your wrists, knees, spine, shoulders, jaw, and ankles were swollen, hot, and tender? Your fingers puffed at each knuckle? Would you cry out? Seek the comfort of human sympathy?

My mother did not complain.

How about the fevers, aches, and fatigue? “Ah,” you would say, “That I can bear. I’d force fluids, nip some whiskey, and take to my sickbed for a few days.” But what if these symptoms persisted, not for a few days, but for years? Would you beg for mercy? Or take the advice of Job’s wife, and “curse God and hope to die”?

My mother did not complain.

What if you bled during times of stress? The odd bit of deep muscle hemorrhage or retinal bleeding? Would you shriek in terror, one fine morning, if your eyes were red-rimmed from blood?

My mother endured all of this silently, cheerfully, even with humor. I remember the year she greeted the neighborhood trick-or-treaters at Halloween red-eyed with blood dripping like tears. Few costumed visitors returned the next year.

At the end, would you accept your progression from morbidity to mortality? Or would you “rage against the dying of the light”?

My mother suffered from a chronic illness, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, JRA. Macrophage activation syndrome or MAS is a painful and life-threatening side effect of JRA. Microphages, literally, “big eaters”, are white blood cells that consume debris and pathogens in the body. If these microphages rampage out of control, they cannibalize the body. MAS’s effects are rapid and often fatal. The stress of the Great Washout triggered an MAS episode.

My mother was a healer and a researcher and she had lived with JRA for years. She understood the significance of her symptoms. Had she sought medical treatment immediately, she would not have collapsed on the eve of the Recovery. Instead, she stayed focused on discovering how Eva Rozen triggered the Great Washout.

My mother didn’t complain. She merely left this world with one more orphan.

___________________________________________

CERBERUS (II)

FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO

Y
ears after the Recovery and the humiliation of a lengthy inquest into my parents’ role in the Great Washout, my anger is still fresh.

Dr. Luminaria, the behaviorist who mentored my father, explained to me that the unconscious mind lacks a sense of time. Events that made a mark on me years ago are still current affairs. The mind’s ability to capture sensory input is unimaginable, but it hoards information, doling out memories with a parsimony that would embarrass a miser.

Another agent works with the same automatism as the unconscious mind. My body colludes with my memories and floods me with the chemistry of emotion—cortisol, adrenaline, acetylcholine, catecholamine. I rage, weep, and cower in equal measures, just as Eva Rozen raged for the whole of her unhappy life. My conscious thoughts might dwell on the beautiful or the mundane only to be washed by a bath of neurotransmitters offered by the rage of an eternal fifteen-year-old child who dwells within my unconscious mind. In an instant, I may shiver with fear, quake with rage, or drift into a fugue state—then wonder where I’d gone. The world had its recovery. When will I have mine?

My mother lay dead in her work area. I bent down and kissed her eyelids and cheeks and lips. I picked up her medicine pouch and Eva’s scarab and walked to my mother’s lab. I felt numb, a blessed sensation that would pass all too quickly.

I powered the nanoscope. The device sprayed a phased pattern of X-rays above and below its target. The emissions have a wavelength of just over one-tenth nanometer so it was accurate to the atomic level. The nanoscope analyzes diffraction patterns and produces a detailed image of an object’s surface and electrical composition.

I focused on the scarab. The nanoscope was maddeningly accurate. It was like searching the boardroom conference table with a jeweler’s loupe to find a single grain of salt.

I cursed Eva and her damned scarab, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, but with enough relative space at nanoscale for the contents of an entire library. Where to look? I remembered Eva’s words, “If you want to hide something, put it in plain sight, but make it very, very small” and started with the irregularities in the pin. On the third try, I found her journal. But I faced a bigger challenge. It contained thousands of pages.

I tore myself away from the nanoscope in frustration and helpless rage. How could I find what I needed, what the world so desperately needed, the key for which my parents had given their lives? How would Eva have tagged the information?

I returned to Eva’s workspace, averting my eyes as I passed my mother’s corpse. The doctor and two NMech admins were tending to the body and looked up at me. Judging by their expression, my absence from her corpse was incomprehensible. I continued before they could try to console me.

Eva’s scant possessions were lined up on her desk. An entire lifetime contained in a half-dozen photos, diplomas, and a few pieces of art. I looked again at the photos and artwork. Nothing there. I was running out of time. Where would she have hidden the key I needed?

Then I remembered my last interchange with Eva, when she penned me in an unlocked cage and instructed me to jack nearly a hundred datapillar accounts. One of the accounts bore no name. It had only one item, a strange piece of artwork. At the time, I gave it little heed; events were starting to move too quickly. I had assumed that the unnamed account was hers.