3
Polio
They were inside a diamond. That was the only way she could think of it. It felt like the top of the tower—the sudden needling pain in her sinuses said it was the top—but Hwa didn’t remember Tower Five wearing this glittering crown on its head.
“Do you like it?” Síofra strode ahead of them and gestured at the walls. The gleaming facets moved with her, angling gently so multiple reflections of her appeared to follow along behind her, each more hesitantly than the last. “We had it programmed in months ago. The crystal only just, well, crystallized last week.”
“Your boss have a thing for Enter the Dragon?” Hwa asked. “The old one, I mean, not the reboot?”
“Indeed I do,” said a voice behind her.
Hwa turned. The facets louvered shut behind a very old man. His appearance alone made it difficult to place his age: the skin had the vellum smoothness of a good chemical peel, and he’d clearly never spent too much time in the sun. You might never have guessed he was the sole survivor of a primitive commune based somewhere outside Palo Alto, where they didn’t believe in shots or pills or dentistry. But it was there in his joints, in the places where the polio had ravaged his body and where stem cells and print-jobs had provided scaffold for the repair work. He moved like an old toy. During his media appearances as CEO, he was still charming: a huge smile, a ready handshake. Looking at him now, though, Hwa understood his desire to protect his heir. At a hundred and five, he didn’t have much hope for training up another one.
“Zachariah Lynch,” he said, lifting one gloved hand. It was incredibly warm in Hwa’s. Gold thread, she realized. A semiconductor in the palm. Something to give him the tactile feedback that age had taken away.
“Go Jung-hwa.”
He nodded. “I know.”
Of course. She could only guess at the file they’d developed on her; by now he’d probably read every text she’d ever sent. His gaze shifted over to the kid. “Joel,” he said. “This is your choice?”
Shyly, the kid stepped forward. “Yes, Father,” he said. “Mine and Daniel’s. I really like her accent.”
“Oh, please.” The facets of the room flipped open to admit a man in a suit. He looked a lot like Joel, only his posture was perfect and his hair was cut too short to be curly. Hwa felt Joel take a step back as he entered. “Joel. Come on. You can’t be serious. Look at her—”
“We’re very serious, Silas,” Síofra said, and Joel’s lookalike stopped in his tracks. Now that he was standing still, Hwa realized he was probably a lot older than he looked: the skin around his eyes was too plump, his forehead no longer moved, and his eyebrows were a shade darker than his hair. Also, he was far too tanned. His skin was burnished darker than either his father’s or his brother’s, but it was a hell of a lot more orange than that of the men who worked the container ships. Nothing screamed “I’m terrified of aging!” louder than a mela-nano infusion.
Silas folded his arms and gave Síofra a long look. If pumpkins could glare, it would have looked about the same.
“We’ve already budgeted for additional security personnel,” Silas said, finally. “And if Joel and Father would let go of this frankly moronic notion of sending Joel to public school, none of this would be an issue.”
Zachariah held up a single finger. Hwa practically heard it creak as the joints bent. “Silas, Joel is the future of this company. He’s also the face of it, for young people. It’s important that he get to know the people whose lives we’re responsible for. Especially given our plans.”
“What plans?” Hwa asked.
Lynch smiled. It was like watching the wax seal on a very dusty bottle of vinegar crack open. “I would be happy to describe them to you, after you have signed a nondisclosure agreement.”
Silas eyed Hwa up and down. “This is what you’re looking for in an assistant? She’s epileptic. Or something. I don’t know. And her mother is a prostitute. A prostitute who pays union dues, but still a prostitute.”
Behind them, Joel gasped. “Silas!”
“It’s okay,” Hwa said. “My mom is a whore.”
“See?” Silas smiled. His teeth were huge and perfect and white. “I was just saying what everybody was thinking.”
“Yeah, having her raise me really introduced me to a lot of assholes,” Hwa said. “Professional assholes that pay their taxes and everything, but still assholes.”
Silence. Hwa directed a grin at Silas. It was more like a baring of her teeth.
“But, you know, as we say in the business: the bigger the asshole, the smaller the cock.”
Silas opened his mouth to say something, when another set of facets opened up and allowed a woman in. She had Joel’s dark hair and eyes, but an entirely different nose and jaw.
“Dad, we need you to sign off on the—who’s that?” Lynch’s daughter stared at Hwa’s face. That, she had said. Like Hwa wasn’t even in the room. Like only her stain was there.
“Katherine, this is Joel’s new bodyguard,” Síofra said.
“I’m really not,” Hwa said. She made for the elevator. “I haven’t agreed to anything. And it was lovely meeting you and all, but—”
“She can’t be hacked.” Síofra said the words a little too loudly. He stared at the elder Lynch as he spoke. “She has no augments. So there’s no recognition algorithm in her eyes that can be rewritten. There’s nothing in her pancreas that can foul up and send her into diabetic shock. She has no neural implants. She can’t hear voices or see visions or be made into someone’s puppet. She doesn’t have legacy code floating around under her skin, waiting to be exploited. She’s…” He trailed off. “Pure.”
There was an awkward pause. Everyone was staring at Síofra, even Joel. The air started feeling heavier and heavier. A terrible sinking feeling opened up in Hwa’s stomach. He had stuck his neck out. She’d kicked him in the face and he’d stuck his neck out. Shit. Even if she didn’t want the job, she didn’t particularly want him to look bad in front of his boss. At least, no worse than she’d made him look by mouthing off to someone he clearly didn’t have much respect for anyway. She cleared her throat to say as much—maybe make an excuse about how he clearly still had a concussion from the force of her kick—but the elder Lynch held up a single finger, forestalling her.
“Once again, Daniel, you have found exactly what I need.” His gaze shifted to Hwa, and his lips pulled back to expose false, perfect teeth. “Let’s see how pure you really are.”
* * *
The walls closed in on her. Literally. The facets of the room shifted once more, and it was just the two of them in a tiny space: Hwa and Lynch. As Hwa stared, the walls shimmered and clips swam across their surfaces. They were of Lynch in younger years. Lynch at state functions. Lynch shaking hands. Lynch with his competitors, arguing silently over some talking point or another.
“I’m a powerful man,” he said, “but you already knew that.”
He waved a hand. The clips changed to static scans. Notes. Packages. Texts. Mutilated animals.
“For men like me, death threats are a sign of success.”
“Yeah?” Hwa winced as blood filled the mirror. “Maybe you should quit while you’re ahead.”
Lynch coughed a laugh. He waved all the images away, then picked something out of his pocket. It looked like a Christmas ornament. At least, what Hwa had seen of Christmas ornaments. Sunny could never be bothered with anything seasonal, unless you counted bikinis. Holidays reminded her of the passage of time.
“What’s that?” Hwa asked.
“It’s a crystal ball. Do you know what that is? It’s something that shows you the future.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“You have to hold it, for it to work. With your bare hands. Hold them out.”
Something inside told her not to do it. She was about to pull her hands away when he dropped the ball into them. It was cool on her cupped palms. No, not cool. Cold. Very cold. Like she’d grabbed a causeway rail on a
winter morning after a long and brutal run. She wanted to let go. Couldn’t. The cold stiffened her hands and then her wrists and then her arms.
In the crystal, she saw her brother.
In the crystal, Tae-kyung was the same age Hwa was now. He was running beside her. It was a nice day. Blue skies. Summer. She remembered those sneakers. The lucky red laces. She remembered because he was pausing to tie them, again, and she was running ahead, completely unaware, and he yelled something as she got further away, about how
“You shouldn’t run where I can’t see you!”
She runs backward. Cocky. But the summer is in her lungs and her blood and drying on her skin. The promise of it. A whole three months without school. “Stop yelling! It’s not like anybody’s going to molest me in broad daylight.” She turns and jogs forward. “That only happens to the girls people actually want.”
For a moment, Tae-kyung looks like she’s slapped him. But he keeps running. His stride is so graceful he manages to trip her up without even breaking his rhythm. He just pushes forward and kicks back, landing a foot on her shin and bringing her toppling to the street. She feels the concrete biting into the heels of her palms. She looks up and he’s still running, back straight, knees high. He is not pleased.
<
“Stop.” Hwa’s face hurt. Her throat hurt. “Please stop.”
The image shifted. The crystal grew hot. She tried to let it go. Drop it. But it was fused to her hands. It was melting into her flesh. She felt the skin of her fingers webbing together. In the crystal, there was fire. And in her ears
The alarm is howling an endless banshee wail. She is standing in the green level above the school. It’s a farm day. Gather the eggs, monitor the bees, deadhead some blossoms. Dessicated flowers fall from her hands as she runs to a window with open louvers. Even this far away, the heat is so intense the windows are throwing up warning sigils. The rig is on fire. Smoke plumes from it thick and black and wide, so wide there is no longer any blue, no sky or sea, just billowing black and licking orange. Her teacher’s hands are on her shoulders, pulling her back, but Hwa can’t leave, has to stay there, right there, watching, because oh Jesus, oh Christ, Tae-kyung is in there, on fire, burning—
“This isn’t the future.” It took everything she had to make the words and push them out. “Show me the future.”
She is standing at the prow of a boat. They are behind schedule, and making up the time with speed. Spray in her face. Breeze on her skin. Her hands curl around the railing and they’re stronger than they’ve ever been. She looks down at them, at her strong new hands, and the left hand is still clean, still clear, and the arm is stainless, and when she turns and sees herself in the porthole, the stain is still gone—
The crystal dropped from her hands. It dropped only a few inches, because she was kneeling. She was crying. Weeping. Silently. From her good eye. She had a moment to feel shame before anger boiled up from her belly to replace it. It surged up into her face, and she felt the pulse of her blood in the skin of her cheeks like she’d been running for hours. When she looked up, Lynch was smiling.
“What the fuck was that?” Hwa pushed herself to her feet. She thought seriously about stomping on Lynch’s little crystal ball. Or maybe just lobbing it through one of the mirrors and out into the ocean. She pointed at it, instead, without looking at it. “What the hell is that thing?”
“It’s an artifact from beyond the Singularity,” Lynch said. “I received it the day Joel was born. I believe it contains high-resolution digitized memories. Raw files from our uploaded future. And every time I look into it, Joel dies.”
Hwa blinked. “What?”
“Every year, on his birthday, I receive one of these.” From his other pocket, Lynch withdrew an empty fist. He opened it. As he did, something glowed. A small white square. Not white like the colour, but white like brightness itself. Like light. Like lightning. Hwa smelled ozone as it crackled into being. Something hummed in her teeth, and there it was: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOEL. YOU HAVE ONE MORE YEAR TO LIVE.
“That’s from his last birthday,” Lynch said, and pocketed the … whatever it was. “His birthday is in June. If I do not act, his final year of secondary school will also be his final year of life.”
Hwa swallowed. She wanted desperately to sit down. Or throw up. She took deep gulping breaths instead. In: two, three, four. Hold: two, three, four. Exhale. And again. And again. How had the thing accessed her memories like that? How had it played them back so accurately? It was like her memories were already squirrelled away somewhere, for other people to watch.
“Beyond the Singularity?” she asked.
“Yes. I believe that these artifacts have been engineered to appear here and now by an artificial superintelligence, or group of superintelligences, to tell me about Joel’s death.”
Hwa wished she’d eaten something. Then she’d have something to vomit all over Lynch’s shoes. That would have been nice.
“You believe that?” Hwa asked. “You really, truly believe that some…” There was no proper hand gesture to communicate the enormity of what Lynch was suggesting. “Some … god-like AI is trying to warn you about your son’s death?”
“Yes. I believe that there is a conspiracy of sentient artificial super-intelligences to kill my son.”
“Like the Terminator.”
Lynch’s lip twitched. “No. That would be preposterous. Imagine the energy required to send physical matter backward across a line of spacetime, when we have printers right here and now that could do the job based on programming sent from any hacked satellite in low orbit. Why, the mundane AI we all depend on every day is already far too vulnerable to brainwashing. And the implants.” He snorted. “The implants commercially available on today’s market are, frankly, no more solid than Swiss cheese. That’s why all of mine are custom coded, just like my drugs.” He smiled and held up his hand, like a magician about to pull off a big trick. “Imagine: centuries from now, a post-human civilization triangulating our temporal and celestial location, and sending back retro-viruses reverse-engineered from the building blocks of their own code? How frustrating that must have been for them. Of course they finally just sent a card.”
Lynch bent down a little to look her in the eye. It was obviously difficult for him to move like that. Scaffolding held up his body the way it might hold up a ruined cathedral. He was being totally sincere, she realized. He believed every word that was coming out of his mouth. He hadn’t the foggiest notion that he might be completely out of his fucking mind. He smiled at her and took her hand to help her straighten up.
“Do you believe in the deep future, Miss Go?”
Her knees popped as she stood. “I never plan that far ahead.”
His dry lips pulled back from his teeth. It was like a smile. Sort of. “Well, I do. And there are others like me who do, too. We’ve been planning for the arrival of these sapient un-consciousnesses for quite some time. Through our business developments, and through our investments, we’ve been trying to prove our willingness to work with these forces when they eventually arrive. It’s an extension of the Roko’s Basilisk idea.”
Hwa decided that this was probably not the right time to remind Lynch that she was a high-school dropout, and that while she was fluent in multiple languages, her mother-tongue was cursing. She had no time for corporate lore, or fairy tales, which were apparently the same thing these days. “Did someone … I don’t know … sell you this idea? Like maybe at a seminar, or something? Like a time-share?”
Lynch looked aghast. “Do you take me for a rube? Some gullible old rube that buys into every promise of eternity? I’m not a religious man, Miss Go. Far from it. I see things as they truly are. I’m prepared for the future. Humanity is coming to an end. S
ome day people like you—people who remain fully organic—will be nothing more than specimens in a museum of humanity.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Hwa said.
“Oh, I do not mean to offend. I think yours is a very brave choice.”
Choice had little to do with it. Money was the thing. When you had no money, you had no choice. But there was no use explaining that to someone like Zachariah Lynch.
“But you still have time to change your mind, Miss Go. If you choose to take this position, you will have the full benefits that come with being part of the Lynch organization. After three months’ probation, you could have the latest stimplant, a chiplab, gene therapy. Whatever you like. Stay with us, and you will never have another seizure again. You will never get glaucoma. And the angioma, well…” She heard the soft machine whisper of his joints moving as he gestured elaborately.
Hwa swallowed. “You sure know how to make an offer.”
“My youngest boy is very special to me, Miss Go. His brothers and sisters don’t see it, of course. They didn’t read his mother’s genetic analysis. I’ve never bred with a finer woman, and I never will again. I’ve known her since she was a child, you know. I knew her parents. I introduced them.”
“That’s…” Hwa tried to think of a word that wasn’t sick. “Cozy.”
“He’s everything I always wanted, and more. And he’s the only one fit to take the reins when I’m gone. But he can’t do that if he’s not here.”
Hwa set her shoulders. “And you want me to protect him?”
“He wants you to protect him, Miss Go. And I trust his decision. I have to. He’s the future.”
Lynch raised his hand. Hwa held hers up to stop him. “Wait. I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“Does Joel know about these threats?”
Lynch shook his head. “No. These are more profound mysteries than he is ready for. And as his father, I don’t want to frighten him. He’s already lived every day with the threat of kidnapping, being my son.” Lynch looked into her eyes. “If you decide to take this position, my one stipulation is that you not tell him why your presence is so very necessary.”
Company Town Page 4
