Upgraded (21 page)

Lan covered her surprise. She’d thought Alexis had used her own funds to bring Lan across the ocean. “You paid for my immigration. Big deal. You still don’t own my nanocore. I have a right to my childhood.”

“Is that what you think?” the woman said. “That Alexis keeps you running so that you can have a normal childhood?” The woman rolled her eyes. “How many other kids spend their lives hiding in abandoned apartments? You’re smart enough to know that’s a lie.”

Lan folded her arms over her chest. She imagined a lump of clay in her hand, twisting it, breaking it. The visualization kept her calm.

“Did Alexis tell you what we wanted you to do?” the woman asked.

“I’m my father’s daughter. You probably think that he taught me things that your captive geniuses can’t figure out. Except I was six years old and just a year into primary school.” Lan shook her head. “You people are crazy.”

“It’s not just what he taught you. It’s your genetics. We’re sure that you’ve got the ability to lay down the protocols that could bring the shards back into a single, secure network. Safe from data plagues.”

Lan liked to think that her father had died fighting the plague. But sometimes, she worried that it was the other way around, that her father had released the first virtual microbes and then disappeared, running from his guilt. Sometimes that worry stuffed her chest and it got hard to breathe. Then she fled to the corners of her mind and practiced her source code manipulations, practiced forgetting.

“I’d rather beg on the street corner than build another plague breeding ground.”

The woman draped one leg over the other. “But that’s the thing—even if you don’t help, another global network is inevitable. People are starting to forget the reason for the sharding. The US government just shut down a messenger app that linked with the pub shard. Think of all those kids that ran out and got augmented after the sharding made us feel safe. Think of the families trying to rebuild the savings they lost in the infowar crash. Humanity needs an unbreakable security solution.”

And the company who provided the solution would have a monopoly. Lan shrugged. “It’s not my problem.”

“We have documentation proving that Alexis defaulted on her debt. Given the details of our arrangement, we can assure that she’ll spend time in prison.”

“And if you lock her up, you lose all your leverage. I’ll have zero motivation to help you.”

The woman’s mouth made a hard line. Lan reached into her pocket and palmed the assembler cartridges she’d swiped from the datahead. Pretending to scratch an itch at her hairline, she snapped them home. At a quick mental command, the assemblers fled the container and filled the reservoir beneath her skull. There, they received their assembly instructions, then tunneled beneath her brain casing, deep into gray matter.

Lan began to code. She concentrated, working out contingencies and conditionals to account for her new circumstances. Soon, she’d forget everything about her father. She’d be useless to these people.

“We’re an upstanding corporation. We’d rather not deviate from the legal guidelines of the countries in which we work. But . . . ”

“But Alexis doesn’t have to be arrested to disappear. Just like my daddy, right?”

The woman uncrossed her legs and set her hands on her knees. She leaned forward. The man stood and traversed the floor, stopping next to Lan’s chair. He placed a hand on the upholstery near her shoulder, showed a set of rings that could do a lot of damage in a punch.

The woman spoke. “Imagine what you will about Alexis. As for your dad, I do have some interesting information. Unfortunately the documents are on a private shard. There’s no connected node here and no DNA scanner that I could use to authenticate.”

Lan sighed. “Nice try. All I have to do to see those documents is heal the Internet, right?”

The man removed his hand and stalked to the window. “Let’s just pull the mom in, Sherri. We’re not getting anywhere.”

Lan’s heart stuttered. She needed to work faster. She started shoving pre-canned subroutines into her apps. A few more minutes, and she’d be ready to execute.

The woman nodded. “There’s a pharma kit in the bedroom. We ought to be able to pull Alexis’ next destination if we get her semi-conscious and run through the scene library. Her brain will light up for images that share context with their travel plans. Whether she wants it to or not.”

Context. Lan’s confidence plummeted. Context. Just like the footrace memory. She could replace the Vietnamese recollections, but she’d never get rid of the other hints that pointed back to her beginning. It would take days, weeks, maybe a lifetime, of planning to remove enough dependencies that the new memories would stick. And anyway, these people weren’t just after her memories of her father—they wanted her capabilities.

Wipe it. Reset. Memzero.

Restarting at nothing, it would take years for her to learn enough to even begin to manipulate software.

It took less than a second to compose the app, and she paused, thoughts poised over the command to execute.

The end of her identity. No more Vietnam, no more worry about Alexis, no more running. But no more memories of birthday parties either, no more late-night dancing to weird music, laughing at Alexis’s clumsy attempts. What if Lan didn’t have to lose herself forever?

She accessed the public shard and started pulling up the wikis she might use to breadcrumb the way back to herself. Lan worked fast, overclocking the process she used to pull the data, maxing her bandwidth.

“Get the pharma,” the woman said.

Lan’s throat clamped down. Just a few minutes left—Lan could never flag enough sites to describe herself.

It was time to let the negative space go. She’d planned it all along, but now that the moment had come, there didn’t seem nearly enough time to say goodbye.

She’d lose the weekends spent rowing with her father in Ha Long Bay but keep the lasagna that Alexis always burned. So long to the taste of her aunt’s
phở.
On summer weekends, Alexis used to push Lan on the swing for hours. That would stay.

Alexis. Always on the run, always protecting the child she’d first met as a six-year-old stranger. Lan could never repay the debt of gratitude. She realized, then, that the best way to thank her was to free her. Lan needed to make sure she could never find Alexis again.

She wiped the wiki changes and started again.

The trail began in Hanoi. Lan pinned a map reference, a satellite shot of her first home. She linked a photo of a woman burning trash on her apartment stoop. Piece by piece, Lan wove together references to her Vietnamese youth. Occasionally, she left memory dumps disguised as image or audio files, real mappings that could be loaded directly. Other times, the wiki article would have to be enough to rebuild a sense of self. When she was finished, she tacked a single command onto her reset app, one that would etch the first URL in the forefront of her mind with a stern directive to wait until she was free from captivity to open it.

The woman was talking. “IV drip stand is in the closet. I want to get the location on Alexis before we have to chase her across the country.”

Lan took a breath and loaded her program into working memory. She said goodbye to herself and let it fly across her core.

The girl opened her eyes. A woman sat in front of her, looking somehow angry, and a series of letters that the girl couldn’t really understand flashed in the upper corner of her vision. The girl cocked her head to the side.

“Your eyes are blue,” the girl said. Her brows were raised, eyes wide. “Azure. Cyan. Indigo. I knew those once.”

Fusion

Greg Mellor

Glen walks down onto the bright sand. The tide is receding but he can still see waves pounding on the reef in the distance. Above the spray the sky is streaked with long white clouds. The backpack digs into his shoulders and he adjusts the straps and steps onto a rocky plateau fanning out from the headland. Colorful anemones shrink from his shadow as he leaps over pools left from the tide. Strange hermit crabs retreat into shells. There is a silver patina blending with the ancient rock layers that he hasn’t noticed before. It’s almost geometric in its structure but he doesn’t stop to ponder such mysteries.

The plateau soon narrows down to a thin land bridge stretching out to the horizon. He sets off at a fast pace, striding from stone to stone. The faint mechanical tick in his breathing provides a comforting tempo. When he estimates he is halfway across he pauses to take a drink from his canteen. Out here the ocean is flat and mirror-like. The wind surges in humid gusts and the glare is intense and he curses out loud for forgetting his hat. Sweat beads on his forehead. The alloy skin on his right hand expands and flexes with the heat.

There’s a ledge here on one side of the land bridge where the rock is flaky and dry and the washed up seaweed smells of decay. A man is sitting on the ledge facing away from Glen. He’s dressed in tattered rags and his arms are tanned like leather. His hair is gray and long and windblown.

You don’t have much time, boy, the stranger says without turning around.

Glen realises that the tide has changed. Clouds are rushing in from the north. Shading his eyes he glances east along the path ahead. The horizon is murky above the land bridge and he can’t see much at all except for the tales in his mind’s eye of lands across the water. He turns and looks west along the path he has traveled. The headland is a small brown lump blending into white beaches either side. He remembers a time on those vast sands when a whale washed up to shore. Its hide was covered in blotches and barnacles but there had been no sign of abnormal growths. Some living things, he knew, were still fully natural. He had waited for hours by the leviathan’s side, small and safe beneath that ancient eye, listening to the waning hammer blows of its heart. When he returned the next day the beach was empty and he felt that something had been irretrievably lost from the world.

He looks now at the stranger’s back, wondering if the man is indeed full flesh like the whale. Then the stranger turns as if sensing Glen’s unspoken question. His face is alloy and reflects the sky. Terrifying mutated eyes bulge out on stalks.

Be careful what you wish for, the stranger says.

Glen quickly shoulders his pack and runs east and doesn’t look back. A cross wind threatens to slow his progress and with it comes sand and leaves from some place along the coast. He soldiers on, head down against the stinging particles, boots scraping against the rocks. The sky darkens with the onrush of the late storm pushed south from the tropics. Waves begin to pound the land bridge and shower him in curtains of water streaked with fading rainbows from the last light of the sun.

He stumbles in the gray, clothes sodden and water curling off his chin and alloy hand, which feels warmer than the other. Lightning strobes across the sky and he sees the corpse he had tripped over. Hollow eyes in a grinning skull. Legs bent beneath its body with one ankle snagged under a rock. Alloy ribs exposed where sea denizens had stripped the full flesh away.

He sings a song from the nomad camps. It’s an old song that is part lament, part celebration of the transformation of flesh. It blocks out the shriek of the wind and the crash of the waves. It doesn’t block the memories.

See, Lizzy says.

She holds up a fish Glen just caught in the shoals. The creature is struggling for air, its mouth opening and closing stupidly. Glen watches in disbelief as she guts the thing with her morphing hooks that substitute for fingers. She eats the flesh.

He shrieks in disgust. Stop. You can’t eat it. Tell her, Mum. I was going to throw it back in . . . Lizzy!

Mum sits on the sand with her legs tucked up against her chest and her hair shining bronze. She says nothing and continues to scratch at the metallic lumps protruding out of her cheeks like small tusks.

You were always holier than thou, Lizzy says between mouthfuls of raw fish.

We have to preserve nature.

Not anymore.

Tell her, Mum. Please.

Mum sighs. Leave your sister alone, Glen. We have to eat.

Lizzy sneers. Yeah, leave me alone, holy boy. Think you’re gonna find the angels across the water one day? Well no one from round here ever made it. What makes you think you’re any different?

Sounds of the storm filter back in. He sprints now, as much from the past as the surging elements. His lips tremble with cold and fear. Before he knows it the ground changes and he’s running up a slope covered with wild tussock grass and broken gum trees. He reaches out and grips a shattered tree trunk. The ocean behind him covers the land bridge in large swells. Waves break at odd angles and surge up to his feet. He kicks against the ground and crawls higher until he finds the shelter of a tree. The sky howls and darkens under the full force of the cyclone and he hugs the tree with all his remaining strength and wonders if the very earth will be uprooted and flung into the sky.

By evening the storm twists away as quickly as it came, leaving the sound of the waves and the faint tick of his cooling alloy and the voices of the dead still stirring in his head.

At some point during the night he sleeps.

In the morning the sky is a blanket of gray clouds with red underbellies. Sunshine slants through in patches as if hesitant to bring warmth. The ocean to the west is a dull gray expanse carved with white tops. The ground he is on forms a wide promontory rising to misty heights to the east. There are things shining up there but he can’t tell whether it’s water falling off rocky outcrops or something else. Ice?

The rations in his pack are soaked and spoilt. He pulls out the rope and the knife and bandages and spare clothes and lays them out on the grass to dry. He quickly stifles the idea of going back to the shore to catch a fish and instead finds some wild berries and fills his canteen from a freshwater pool that appears to have formed during the storm.

Afterwards he packs and continues up the hillside. Sunlight casts the mist aglow and lifts his spirits as he walks. The incline steepens but the ground is solid and his legs are strong. Alloy not flesh. And still no sign of mutation even after fifteen winters. He wonders at that. His Mum blessed him for it. His sister hated him for it. The thought dampens his good mood and by evening he’s tired and hungry. He makes a fire on a small ledge from twigs and eats more of the berries. The remains of old camps litter the ledge and he speculates as to how many pilgrims have ventured here in search of answers. Then he remembers the stranger with the eyes and he holds his hands closer to the fire and wonders if there really are answers to be found at all.