Crache

by Mark Budz

  Fola reaches out a hand. But before she can touch the face, the data packet the butterfly represents disintegrates into virtual air. Ditto the flower and a nearby bumblebee, fat with recombinant instruction sets.

  Fola blinks, frowns, then queries Ephraim. No answer. She tries her information agent. “Pheidoh?”

  Nothing. Her IA has dropped offline. A first; the information agent is nothing if not dutiful.

  Unnerved, she signs out of the ribozone. The virtuality collapses and the datawindow image of the garden on the inside of her eyescreens is replaced by an in-vivo view of airless rock and ice.

  Her stomach lurches at the foreshortened horizon of the asteroid and steep-walled canyon outside the window of the cliff-face arcology. She’s never been good with heights. Plus, the image of the duck is still tattooed to her retinas. Where had that come from?

  “Ephraim? Pheidoh?”

  Still no response. Great. Now what?

  Fola cranes her head back, searching for the team of molectricians she’s assisting. She spots the three-person tuplet next to the carbyne-frame vault that supports the lush topiary of circuitree branches, parasol palms, and clumped bananopy leaves that are part of the budding warm-blooded ecotecture.

  She opens a comlink to the team. “Is everything okay?”

  Liam is the first to respond. All puffed up, full of goofy sarcasm and the snide, jug-eared attitude he tries to pass off as humor. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  From the moment she arrived on Mymercia, he’s given her a bad time. First, about being a Performance Evaluation, Enhancement, and Validation specialist—what he calls his pet PEEV. Second, about the time she spent as a Jesuette. Never mind that it was against her will. He can’t resist teasing her. Nun for me. Nun right now, thanks. Nun too soon. Nun of your business. Silly jokes like that. Playful. He’s like a schoolboy with a crush. Pretty soon he’ll pull her hair. Still, it’s good to hear his voice. She’s not totally cut off.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Ingrid demands, terse. Unlike Liam, the team’s leader is all business.

  Fola squirms under Ingrid’s annoyance. “There seems to be some kind of glitch in the infostream.”

  “What kind of glitch?”

  “I’m not sure. Data loss maybe, or a transmission error. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Everything looks fine to me,” Ingrid says, impatient to finish with the array of biolum panels they’re wiring to the arcology’s main power grid. The job is taking longer than expected. There’s a circuit relay problem she’s been unable to isolate.

  Fola pinches the tip of her tongue between pursed lips. “I just thought I’d check. That’s all.”

  Ingrid doesn’t say anything. No surprise. What’s weird is that Liam is quiet. Normally he jumps right in. She always has to cut him off to keep him from pestering her. Not only that, they’ve stopped all work. She can see them pointing and gesticulating at each other in confusion.

  “What’s going on?” she says.

  Silence.

  “Hello?” Louder this time.

  Nothing. Her cochlear implant is dead. She’s de facto deaf. Not only that, she’s not receiving any input over the softwire link to the warm-blooded plants. She’s totally disconnected. Isolated.

  Her stomach constricts. Something’s wrong. She can feel it . . . a presence slipping into her via the softwire.

  The sensation starts in her fingers and slithers up her arm, wrapping itself around her nerves like a snake coiling around the branch of a tree.

  Probing. Tasting. Hunting for a core part of her being. She tries to make herself small, to crouch hidden in a safe corner of herself. But the feeling tightens its grip. Her throat squeezes. She reaches for the cross hanging around her neck under the biosuit. . . .

  One, two, three, four,

  Christ’s the one who we adore.

  After three years, deprogrammed by the ICLU, stripped of the slave pherions the Ignatarians had dosed her with to turn her into a model Catholic, the chant rises up out of nowhere. It’s still part of her, indelibly engraved.

  Five, six, seven, eight,

  Meet you at the Pearly Gate.

  She fights a sudden wave of nausea, clamps her hands over her ears in an effort to shut out the remembered rhythm. Instead, the frantic movement shifts her center of gravity, catapults her into an off-kilter wobble, away from the aluminum trellis she’s been using to steady herself in the low-g arcology.

  Nine, ten, eleven, twelve,

  Goin’ with the saints to dwell.

  It’s no use. The cheerful ditty—recited on street corners, in refugee camps, and during pep services complete with a lot of enthusiastic clapping, pompom waving, and jumping up and down for joy—has been resurrected against her will, a safety mechanism that’s as disconcerting as it is autonomic.

  The presence pauses long enough for Fola to shudder. Her skull throbs, filled with a dry abscess of longing. She feels horribly alone. Abandoned. Without the physical and emotional support of Ephraim or the warm-blooded plants, she’s helpless against the past. It lies in wait, a serpent in the grass that she can’t seem to step over or around. She can hear its breathy sibilance, sense its shadow in the weed-choked thicket of her darkest thoughts.

  Our Father who art in heaven . . .

  She knows that the conviction, the fervent belief in God that the Ignatarians doped her with, wasn’t genuine because it didn’t come from her. She didn’t choose to believe. Faith was forced on her. But part of her still worries that she had her chance to be saved and blew it. What if the Ignatarians were right? What if she’s going to burn in hell forever because she closed her heart to the one true savior, turned her back on indentured servitude and, at the same time, life everlasting?

  Fear rushes in, anaphylactic, and her throat clenches in a painful reminder of the afternoon she was ripped from the body and blood of the Church. . . .

  Fifteen years old. Spreading the word with Xophia and Joi on an arid street corner in Singapore, hurling slogans at the Sin-O-Matic sexplex in front of them.

  Hey, hey, whaddaya say?

  Let’s all pray for Judgment Day!

  Fola added a few brazen shakes of her pompoms for good measure, just to let the club know she was serious. Not that anyone was paying attention to the Jesuettes or what they had to say. Especially the four old guys smoking cigarettes on a spit-stained bench by the curb. They were probably deaf, anyway.

  The sex-parlor-cum-VRcade was located in an old three-level aplex that had been retrofitted after the ecocaust. The building was a hodgepodge of solar panels, wind generators, condensation collectors, photovoltaic windows, and thermoelectric mesh. It was totally independent of the public-domain ecotecture that provided the city with electricity, filtered water, clean air, UV protection, sewage treatment, and waste disposal. The ancient stucco building squatted in an oasis of almond-scented umbrella palms and circuitrees. Succulent aquaferns, rooted to the aplex’s backup water supply system via a pair of massive stone urns on either side of the main entrance, formed an inviting leafy arch over the recessed doorway. Above this, a peeling biolum marquee advertising Debbie Does Bangcock gave off a desultory glow that reflected wanly off the canopy of fronds.

  Fola rubbed her sweaty arms through the rough cotton of her sprayon robe. Dry-swallowed the scent of cigarettes and espresso from the café across the street. Breathed in the fragrance of violinette flowers from the florist a couple of shops down. It was early afternoon and hot, even in the shade of the umbrella palms. A feeling of lethargic ennui had settled over the street. The sugary aroma of vat-grown melons at a fruit kiosk gnawed at her stomach. Her feet hurt. But that was all right. She felt peaceful, at one with the world and her fellow Jesuettes. The three of them were like a single person. Part of a larger unified whole that formed the body of Christ.

  Plus she was outfitted in the latest Popeware, which always made her feel good. Carnation pink robe with gold embroidery. Teeny diamond-encrusted ser
aph brooches that took flight to form a halo of angels. The Divinely Incensed collection of deodorants, which scented her sweat with myrrh, spread a feeling of goodwill to anyone who came within one meter of her, and temporarily protected her from heathen pherions in the Singapore ecotecture. If she stayed too long the broad-spectrum antipher in the deodorant would wear off and she would become susceptible to any number of embarrassing and potentially fatal physical discomforts, ranging from incontinence, hives, and nausea to tongue-biting convulsions.

  Joi and Xophia were similarly costumed. Except that Xophia had on this Joan of Arc face appliqué to keep from being identified by any surveillance bitcams or flitcams operated by the sex parlor. Xophia used to be a sex worker at a franchise Sin-O-Matic in Seoul, before her contract was purchased by the Church. The stories she told were awful. She knew firsthand just how degrading the place was. It was terrible what she’d had to endure. A mastectomy, a hysterectomy, and a clitorectomy. Synthapse nanosockets for prosthetic breasts and genitals. The mods enabled her to emulate the sexual attributes of a lot of different women and men. Even animals. With the plug ’n’ play attachments, anything was possible. According to Xophia, most customers opted for the standard glam celebrities. Sphinxter or Lucy Fur, as well as golden oldies like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and Hitler. Those were the most popular requests. A few of the clients she’d serviced had more exotic tastes. These brought custom plug-ins to satisfy their particular fetishes.

  “But how do they know what they’re getting is . . . accurate?” Fola asked Xophia one morning as they were dressing for matins, the first prayer session of the day.

  Xophia adjusted the straps of her bra. “How do they know what’s accurate?”

  “The . . . you know.” Fola lowered her eyes, too embarrassed to say what she was thinking. Ashamed of her inability to suppress her curiosity.

  Xophia grinned. She grew up among the street kids in Rio. Had seen things that Fola couldn’t even begin to imagine. Didn’t know the meaning of the word “shame.” “The inserts?” She touched her panties in the area of her hairless crotch.

  Fola nodded, looked away. A blush scorched her face. “I mean, how do people know the historical stuff is . . . anatomically accurate? The right size and shape?”

  “The manufacturers can tell from the old movies. A lot of them had nude scenes they can extrapolate from.”

  “What about the people who were never on film?” she said. “Like Cleopatra, or Napoleon?”

  Xophia withdrew her hand from her underwear, returned her attention to the bra. “Forensics.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s where they reconstruct the physical characteristics of somebody who’s dead. How tall they were. How much they weighed. What they looked like. The color of their skin and hair.”

  “How?”

  Xophia scratched the rash around the nanosocket jack that had replaced her left breast. “From bones and DNA.”

  Fola shook her head, not wanting to get into specifics, the gory details about how, exactly, the reconstruction process worked. “I don’t get it,” she finally said.

  Xophia waved a hand. “The technical details aren’t important. It’s the end result that matters. As long as people believe what they’re paying for is accurate, they’re happy.”

  “No,” Fola said. “What I don’t understand is the allure. The attraction.”

  Xophia pursed her lips. “You’re not supposed to. That’s the whole point of being an Ignatarian.”

  True. But it was different with Xophia. She knew—had known—what it felt like to be physically attracted to someone. Fola had never known, she’d been dosed too early. That part of her personality had been aborted. The only love she’d ever know was filial. She didn’t even blame her father for selling her. She had forgiven him, sent him an e-mail thanking him, telling him how happy she was as an indentured servant.

  “Do you ever miss it?” Fola said.

  Xophia didn’t answer.

  Hey, hey, whaddaya say?

  Let’s all pray for Judgment Day!

  Of course, it wasn’t the sex workers she was condemning. At least, not the ones who were being held against their will. They couldn’t leave, not without killing or seriously injuring themselves. Like Xophia, they were innocent victims, shackled to the club by slave pherions in the fake Turkish rugs, imitation Moroccan candles, and pornographic Chinese wallscrolls. No . . . it was the club’s owners and clientele Fola was denouncing—consigning to eternal damnation.

  It seemed to be working. No one had approached the Sin-O-Matic in the three hours since they’d taken up residence out front. That could just be the heat. But Fola liked to think they were having an effect. People seemed to be getting the message. Except for a couple of Euro caucs drinking coffee at the café, dudes in khaki pants and nylon mesh shirts, who kept staring at them. Like the Jesuettes were proselytizing for the sexplex instead of against it. Which was unnerving. But not as bad as when one of them lifted his cup in an appreciative salute and whistled.

  “Just ignore them,” Joi advised. “They’ll leave.”

  “I don’t want them to leave,” Fola said, brandishing her pompoms. “I want them to understand what we’re doing.”

  So she flounced over to the café, all indignant, to confront the two slumhounds.

  “Yum,” the guy who had saluted her said, licking his lips as he appraised her pink robe. “Cotton candy.” He was bald and had these tattunes on his head that kept changing, randomly going from one image to the next and playing different music. Like multistreaming a lot of different netcasts. It made her dizzy.

  The man grinned. “You like my adwear?”

  “No.” Pompoms on her hips, emphatic. “I think it’s disgusting.” The outline of a tongue formed in the middle of his forehead. It looked poised to lick her.

  “Then how come you’re staring?” the second guy said with a wink.

  “I’m not staring.” The tongue began to morph into a phallus. Fola looked away, back toward Xophia. And felt a sting on the side of her neck.

  Tried to open her eyes.

  Couldn’t.

  She woke sometime later. Alone, disoriented, sticky with fear. She lay on a soft gel mattress in a shuttered room. Light from the window fell across her in narrow, diffraction-grating slats. Photon-thin. Too sharp to look at. Chills wracked her, a cold fever. She felt clammy inside. Syrupy.

  Where was she? Who was she? Panic caught her in unhinged jaws and swallowed, pulling her down into suffocating darkness.

  When she woke again, it was night and cooler. With the passing of the day’s heat her fear had evaporated, and with it her belief in God.

  Mostly. The deindoctrination didn’t get everything. A few stubborn neural pathways survived. Mainly the fear of missing out on eternal life, a Madonna-ish urge to remain chaste, and her friendship with Xophia.

  Xophia, who had waved good-bye when Fola glanced back. A quick farewell before the agents took her.

  Xophia had known. She was working undercover for the ICLU and had arranged for the agents to take her, set her free.

  Because Fola was still legally contracted to the Church, and because the ICLU couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t be located by the Ignatarians and reindoctrinated, the two ICLU deprogrammers put her in contact with an unregistered IA. The IA made her an offer.

  Would she be interested in reclading to a completely new environment? A gengineered ecology, radically different from any of the politicorp-designed ecotectural systems that had been built after the Armageddon of overheating, overpopulation, and overeverything, including the loss of 98 percent of the world’s pre-ecocaust species?

  Would she be willing to emigrate offworld?

  Would she be willing to give up everything and everyone she’d known in order to become part of the new gestalt?

  Hey, hey, whaddaya say? . . .

  “Fola?”

  She blinks and finds herself back in the cliff-face arcology. Upside down
, staring through a lightdome at the phosphor-limned petals of a solcatcher. Parabolic membranes stretched sail-taut over structural cartilage. The petals billow and spin in the faint breeze given off by the distant sun, providing thermal and electric energy for the arcology. Less than a kilometer away, the Kuiper belt is a pearl necklace.

  Hard to spec if the other solcatchers in the array have opened or not. Without the softwire link, or a bitcam image, she has no way of knowing.

  Air blowing somewhere, noiseless. As furtive and tentative as the breaths of the half dozen refugees she knows are hiding somewhere in the arcology. Waiting. Caught in a collective cessation of all activity.

  “Fola?” Urgency frames the question, an anxious, peremptory concern. “Can you hear me?”

  Pheidoh. The information agent’s voice sends a wave of comfort through her, as clear and sustained as a struck note. Hard to believe how much she’s come to rely on it—not just for information but companionship.

  “I hear you.” She flips. “What’s going on?”

  “Good question.”

  “Where are the others?” She reorients herself, looks in the direction where Ingrid and Liam were last working. “Are they okay?”

  No answer. The IA is offline again. Not only that, her biosuit is flickering, strobing between solid fabric and something more diaphanous and fuzzy. She can spec her hand through the suit, make out the tracery of bones beneath translucent flesh.

  “Fola?” Liam’s face blooms on the inside of her wraparound shades. Eyes wide, brimming with fear. “Help . . .” His lips form an O as he struggles to speak and a bubble of saliva balloons from his mouth.

  “Why?” she says. “What’s—?”

  He stiffens. For an instant his face resembles a papier-mâché mask with black-painted eyes, nose, and the grinning, cadaverous outline of teeth. A second later he’s gone, little more than an afterimage.