by Mark Budz
“But not everyone is softwired,” Fola says.
“Actually most people are. They just don’t realize it because the molectronics are bundled with the ecotecture.”
“Really?”
“It facilitates automatic pherion updates and clade-profile tweaks. It’s easier and cheaper than having people come into a hospital or clinic.”
“When did this happen?”
“Most governments began the implementation eighteen months ago, as part of a BEAN chartered agreement.”
“Did all of the politicorps sign on?”
“Yes.”
And now it’s being used by somebody, this Bloody Mary, to wreak havoc. A radical org. It has to be. She prays it’s not the ICLU, doesn’t see how it could be. The ICLU isn’t like that.
“What’s so important about the ceremony?” she says. Beyond a palliative effect, there’s little or no real medical benefit the healing ceremony can provide. In the overall scheme of things, it seems like a waste of time.
“The bruja,” Pheidoh tells her. “Doña Celia. She’s the only one who can exorcise Bloody Mary.”
Fola’s brow puckers. “From who? Lejandra?”
“Yes.”
A vague shake of her head. “How?”
“‘When I’m fine’ly gone/it’s a fore_gone conclusion/your soul’s gonna cry . . . SoulR Byrne. SoulR Byrne.’”
Fola blinks. It’s the same song she woke to after the accident. She listens to the thumping, teeth-jarring beat. The harsh chanted lyrics and the eerie, melodic undercurrent that gives the song a mournful quality despite the relentless bass. “I don’t get it,” she says.
“The song is a critical part of the curing ceremony,” Pheidoh informs her as soon as the music stops.
“Why? What difference does it make?”
“Without it, the bruja won’t be able to get rid of Bloody Mary. Eliminate her, and you eliminate the source of the disease.”
“I don’t understand how a song is going to cure Lejandra and the others, get rid of the quanticles and put an end to the outbreak.”
The datahound wipes its forehead. “It’s difficult to explain.”
“If you want me to help you, I need to know what the connection is between the quanticles and Bloody Mary. I need to know who she is. Where she is. You have to trust me, for a change.”
The IA freezes, goes static. A beat passes. Two. Just when she thinks it’s hung, a pained look crosses its face, as if it’s about to pass a kidney stone. “Bloody Mary was an IA.”
Fola narrows her eyes. “Was?”
“She’s . . . changed.”
“How?”
The IA wets its lips. “Go out enough decimal places and the world doesn’t look the same. Errors creep in. Uncertainties. Nothing is perfect.”
“Okay,” she says, “fine.” At least now she’s got something solid she can wrap her brain around. “I still don’t see how playing a particular song is going to help.”
“The music contains certain information that—when transmitted to Bloody Mary—will make her . . . stop.”
“You mean encrypted information embedded inside the music? Like a worm or a virus?”
“More or less.” The IA flickers. It seems anxious, distracted.
“Who put it there?”
“I’ll explain later,” Pheidoh says. The flickering amplifies. “We’re running out of time.”
Fola sucks in a deep breath—“All right”—and reaches for the absent cross, stops herself.
Pathetic. She’s like a baby, wanting to suckle not for hunger but for comfort. Or a feeble gerontocrat reaching for a crutch.
One young, the other old. Both helpless.
In the biodigital construct of the ribozone, the Front Range City ecotecture is portrayed as a Parthenon-like building enclosed on all sides by a three-deep procession of colonnades. The white marble columns are fluted, encircled by climbing roses, and capped by leafy capitals. The columns aren’t really columns, they’re a virtual representation of a real-world structure, like a power-storage grid or water-distribution system. The same goes for the barrel vault the columns support, the purple wisteria that hangs from the overhead lattice of interconnecting beams, and every other visible feature of the garden, down to the smallest insect. Bamboo fills the gaps in between the rows of columns. The air feels desert dry, hot. A scaly lizard scampers across the stone footpath in front of her, into a clump of dry-bladed grass and spiny yucca that’s growing among the rock outcroppings at the base of the columns. Some kind of ornisect darts around the barrel vault above her—a dragonfly with feathers and a beak, or a small bird with a thorax and four wings. The barrel vault is a tangle of cactustree branches laden with thick oval-shaped leaves. The leaves are dotted with tiny yellow flowers and every few seconds a flower—which might also be a butterfly—detaches from one leaf, flutters to another, and reattaches.
Fola turns to Pheidoh. The IA has shed its anthropomorphized canine persona and chosen to represent itself as a nineteenth-century archaeologist dressed in khakis, black leather boots, and a pith helmet. Gender-neutral features. How does the software think of itself, when she’s not around? Male? Female? She has no clue, has never thought to ask. “
“Is this where the migrant workers are?” she says.
The IA shakes its head. “The braceros aren’t allowed to interact directly with the local ecotecture. They’re housed in a temporary subclade.”
She looks around. “Where is that?”
Pheidoh points toward an iron-gated archway set between two columns at the far end of the garden. The opening is small, half-concealed by a bamboo thicket that forms a wall on both sides of the passageway.
Five, six, seven, eight,
Meet you at the Iron Gate.
More lizards scatter out of her way as she heads down the path. It’s hard to tell what their ecotectural niche is, what function the program’s real-world analog performs. It doesn’t appear to be security or information exchange. Diagnostics maybe, or system optimization; a dead bug dangles from the mouth of one lizard.
As Fola nears the gate, she notices that the bamboo crowding it on both sides has hooked barbs on the stems and at the ends of the leaves. Up close, it resembles a cactus more than bamboo.
“Careful,” Pheidoh warns. “The needles are detachable.”
“What are they?”
“A prison pherion. They’re located along the perimeter of the bracero subclade to keep the migrants from leaving. If the needles are brought into the compound, they could injure anyone who comes into contact with them.”
She didn’t realize the datastream was two-way—that whatever she does inside the garden will be transmitted back to earth.
Through the wrought-iron gate, at the far end of a narrow passage, she can make out a smaller side garden. It’s more of a courtyard, really. There are no Corinthian columns or barrel vault. Instead, the courtyard is enclosed on three sides by a low wall and shaded by umbrella palms. Fola releases the catch on the gate, pulls on the handle. The hinges groan in protest. She tugs on the latch harder and the gate swings open. Before she can let go, five or six scarablike beetles emerge from crannies in the gate and scuttle toward her fingers.
Fast.
She jerks her hand back. Too late; they fasten onto her with chemical mandibles. She feels a faint sting—“Ouch!”—and shakes her hand. Hard. The beetles don’t seem to notice. They’re glued tight to her.
She glances at the Pheidoh. The intrepid explorer has taken out a spiral notebook and is scribbling on one of the pages.
Another beetle bites down on her. A burning sensation infiltrates her lungs, followed by a sudden prickly dizziness as the molectronics connected to her nervous system download and convert the digital information represented by the beetles into really nasty neurotoxins.
“Pheidoh? . . .”
“I’m working on it.” The IA continues to jot notes. It’s writing in some kind of symbolic script that looks vaguely
hieroglyphic. As if they are in ancient Egypt instead of the eastern plains of Colorado.
“Please hur—”
She can’t breathe. Her knees sag like half-empty bags of sand. She reaches for the gate to keep from falling and . . .
The burning sensation in her lungs stops. She takes a breath, swallows, regains her balance. The beetles mill around in confusion on her arm, lose their grip on her, fall to the ground, and scuttle off.
“Sorry.” The IA tucks the notepad and pencil into the breast pocket of its shirt. “That particular security pherion is an update of an older version. I had to softwire you the latest antipher. You’re protected now.”
Tentatively Fola touches the gate. Nothing. The beetles have lost interest. She swings open the gate, slips through and, careful to avoid the bamboo, makes her way to the courtyard.
If anything, it’s hotter and drier than the main garden. In addition to the umbrella palms, there are several scraggly circuitrees growing in a line along one wall, as well as a number of odd, barrel-shaped cacti. Like the columns in the main garden, the cacti aren’t really cacti, but an in-virtu representation of a real-world ecotectural system.
“Underground water storage,” the IA says, following her gaze. “Fed by aquaferns in the foothills.”
The walls aren’t that high, not like the bamboo. They seem to be made out of adobe brick. They’re topped by some kind of fragrant bougainvillea and don’t look very secure.
A flicker of movement in the shadow at the foot of one wall catches her attention.
“I wouldn’t get too close,” Pheidoh advises.
“I don’t see—”
She spots the snakes, entwined at the foot of the wall. Twisted together in a single long snake that reminds her of a thickly braided strand of barbed wire.
She shudders, rubs her left arm, and retreats until the snakes calm.
“I’ve located them,” Pheidoh says, standing next to her.
A datawindow opens at eye level in front of her, superimposed on the virtuality of the ribozone. Doors within doors. In the translucent pane, the grainy composite of a room forms, cobbled together out of various image-streams from surveillance bitcams in the hardfoam walls. The room is dark, a roil of dancing, candlelit shadows. When the sound kicks in, a loud burst of music, it adds a sense of urgency to the scene in which an old woman, the bruja, is kneeling over a slightly younger but skeletal-looking woman in a bed.
Lejandra.
Four people have gathered around the two women in a loose semicircle. None of them are playing an instrument. They appear worried. The bruja bends over the sick woman, kisses her on the upper chest, and then turns and spits on the floor.
The woman reminds her of the old man Xophia was caring for. Her symptoms are different, horrible black bruises that follow the outline of her bones, but she looks just as bad.
This is what’s going to happen to Xophia, Fola thinks.
The pace of the music quickens. The bruja stands up, holding a gourd in her clawlike hands. The image cuts to her approaching one wall, where she stops, raises the gourd to her lips, blows, and then calls out.
“Lejandra!” She beckons with one hand. “Ven aquí.” Come here. “Your aunt is waiting. Your uncle is waiting. Your cousins are waiting. They are calling for you to come home. La Llorona is gone. Come back to where you belong. Come back to your loved ones. Come back to yourself.”
In the foreground, a sixth person, sitting cross-legged on the bare lichenboard floor, hunches over a battered guitar that doesn’t seem capable of creating the volume of sound she’s streaming.
L. Mariachi.
From this angle Fola can’t get a good look at the musician. His head is bowed, obscuring his features. All she can see is the back of his neck and shoulders, where a toy parrot clings to his shirt collar, and his left hand on the neck of the guitar. Fingers curled around the frets in a twisted lump. Sweat streaks his dusty sprayon shirt, a sheen of perspiration varnishes the scuffed soundboard of the guitar. Ditto the balding spot on the top of his head, which is fringed with a halo of limp gray curls. The rawhide-rough skin on his neck is rent with fissure-deep wrinkles.
She turns to Pheidoh. “How old is he?”
“Fifty-eight.”
Judging by his appearance, she thought he was older. In his late sixties. “What happened to his hand?”
“He was dosed with a degenerative neurotoxin,” Pheidoh says.
“A work accident?”
“No. Another musician, the owner of a guitar he stole. That was one of the reasons he became a bracero. He couldn’t play music anymore.”
The view shifts. Follows the old woman as she works her way to another corner of the room and repeats the ceremony with the gourd. From this new angle, L. Mariachi still has his face down but she can make out more of his features: drooping mustache, aquiline nose, a high, flat forehead scarred by determination, despair, and long hours of physical labor. The past few years as a migrant worker haven’t been kind to him. He is tired and worn out, nearing the end of the road.
Fola winces as the tendons stand out in his neck and forearms, as strained as the metal guitar strings that are bloodying the tips of his fingers. If anything, his playing is becoming more reckless, more wild with each passing second.
No way he can go on, she thinks.
But he does; long enough for the bruja to shuffle to the fourth corner in the room, blow into the gourd, and call out.
Her final shout hits L. Mariachi like a physical blow. The parrot squawks in alarm, then leaps to safety as he pitches back against the wall and slumps to one side, the guitar pressed to his chest like a dead child.
The sudden absence of sound is deafening. The image freezes, and Fola wonders if maybe the transmission is hung. Then one of the boys in the room lurches toward the fallen musician, followed quickly by the others.
“What happened?” the second boy asks, coming up behind first. “What’s wrong with him?”
The boy’s father puts a hand to his forehead. “He’s burning up.”
“Ay!” his wife exclaims. “We should take him to the clinic.” She reaches for the guitar.
“No.” The bruja’s voice is knife sharp.
The wife jerks her hands away as if slapped. “We can’t just leave him here,” she protests.
“Why not?” the man says.
“Because if he dies, we’ll get blamed. The politicorp will say it’s our fault. Then where will we be?”
“He’s having a vision.” The bruja spits into the palm of her hand and smears the saliva onto L. Mariachi’s forehead. “It’s nothing serious.”
“What about the guitar?” the father says.
“When he wakes up, tell him it’s his. I want him to have it.”
“You think we should let him sleep here?” the older boy asks.
The bruja nods, stands. She shuffles to the side of the bed and begins to gather up her curative herbs and paraphernalia.
“How long do we have to look after him?” the wife asks. She follows the bruja to the bed while the others remain with L. Mariachi.
“Not long.” The bruja finishes packing her duffel bag. “Until morning. He’ll be fine then.”
The wife purses her lips unhappily, but nods.
One of the boys, the younger of the two, leaves the room. A couple of seconds later he returns with a blanket. He spreads it on the floor next to L. Mariachi. Together, the two boys and their father shift the musician onto his side and scoot the blanket under him.
When L. Mariachi is covered with the blanket the bruja leaves, followed by the husband and wife. The two boys stay behind, speaking in soft whispers, until their mother shows up five minutes later and orders them to bed. Shortly, the father joins his wife at the side of the bed. He puts his arm around her. She leans into him, too tired all of a sudden to hold herself up.
“Your niece will be okay,” he assures her. “We’ve done everything we can.”
“That doesn’t mea
n it will be enough.”
“That’s for the Virgin to decide, sonrisa de mi corazón. Lejandra is in God’s hands, now. Not ours.”
Fola likes that. Sonrisa de mi corazón. Smile of my heart.
“I can’t believe he’s here,” the woman says. She cuts a glance at L. Mariachi on the floor. “After all these years. I thought he’d have moved on by now.”
“He’ll be gone soon.”
“Not soon enough.” The woman spits air. “The pendejo is nothing but trouble. I just know it.”
The two of them stand like that for a while, supporting each other, before fatigue kicks in and they call it a night.
“What’s the prognosis?” Fola asks when they’ve left the room.
“For who?” Pheidoh says.
She was thinking of Lejandra. But the IA might be able to tap the biomed readout for L. Mariachi, too. “Both of them.”
“L. Mariachi is suffering from dehydration and exhaustion.”
Nothing a good night’s rest and a little water won’t cure. “What about Lejandra? Is she still infected?”
Pheidoh nods, the shadow from the IA’s pith helmet falling like a dark veil across its features.
So the ceremony didn’t work. No surprise there. Maybe now the IA will come to its senses. “Are the others at risk?”
That’s one of her main concerns at this point. Damage control.
The datahound stares, head down, as if lost in a hypnotic trance. Except for one eyelid, which is blinking so fast it looks like a hummingbird wing.
Fola reaches for the datahound but stops short, afraid that if she touches the image it will pop like a soap bubble.
“Pheidoh?” She hates the tremor in her voice. “What is it? Are you okay?”
In response the rest of the IA’s image goes into a palsied flicker. Rapidly winking in and out of existence.
“Pheidoh! Talk to me.” Fola pinches her lower lip between her teeth and curls her fingers around the absent cross below her throat. Her hand trembles, reverberating to the staccato waver. “Say something. Please?”