Asimov's SF, September 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Okay, so you can't tell me.” He doesn't look at me as we cross the carpeted floor to the elevator. The windows are actually high-end flatscreens and offer us a clean and sparkling Bangkok cityscape.

  “Illusion.” He follows my gaze and his voice is bitter. “The illusion of a real city. Just as my life has been an illusion of free will.”

  “It's not an illusion,” I tell him mildly. “You can walk out of here and go be a jazz musician. Nobody is going to come by your flat and break your knees.”

  “I'm going to do that.” He meets my eyes, stiff with rebellion and challenge. “You watch.”

  I smile as the elevator door opens and he flinches at the cheap, warped paneling and the faint smell of incense and sweat that wafts out. He has forgotten about the shabby sex bar downstairs. I don't think he's going to like his life as a musician for long even if he wins enough on the poker circuit to live well. Which he may. He has tested out in the top percentile and wants to be the best, have the best, even if he's feeling a bit of adolescent rebellion right now. I watch him straighten his shoulders a hair before he steps onto the elevator. I'll do my best to make sure that he doesn't get killed in some dive as he figures out what he really wants from life, but you can't hedge all your bets. That two-year-old who starts winning the big races can still break a leg on the home stretch one day.

  I nod and a waiter comes up with a fresh glass of sparkling water and lime and I go sit back down to watch for bargains.

  He was my first. I borrowed the money to buy the Future lot at my first Auction. I'm good at what I do—one of the best. I've personally purchased several excellent Starteds since. They're all close to earning out already and they're my retirement investment. But that first purchase, that first successful Future that you pick up at a bargain rate—it's always going to be special. And I was young.

  I wanted to tell him. Even I, who play this game better than nearly anyone, even I wanted to tell him. But then I would have given him a face, a person to rebel against. Right now, he really doesn't have anything except an ephemeral Big Brother that doesn't exist unless you're sharp enough and talented enough to find the threads woven through everything. Even that is not one person, no one Big Brother. No, there are thousands and thousands of pieces to that mosaic—some huge, many small. It'll be hard for him to stay angry, and if he survives his rebellious musician phase, he'll be back.

  He may be my replacement, one day, when I get ready to retire. He has the raw talent. I wish he wasn't quite so white. There's that tribalism thing again. I drink my lime-flavored water and watch two of the big ag companies bid against each other for a highly talented bioscience prospect from a high-scoring middle-class Ethiopian family. Low overhead on that one, most likely, so they're willing to bid high.

  You know, you never really lose those tribal reactions and even though I can read his genetic profile like your average person reads a menu, that white skin and blond hair still grate on me.

  The woman who bought me as a Future didn't tell me either when she walked up to me at the embassy cocktail party I'd crashed on my own anger-driven search and invited me to the Auction. I was at the same stage as my guest, outraged and fascinated by the hints of a vast network of subtle manipulation I'd been uncovering. She told me she owned me years later, at the Auction where I bid on my guest.

  I'll probably tell him then, too.

  When he buys his first Future.

  You get over the shock pretty fast, that shock when you find out that luck doesn't exist. You accept that the world you believed in is simply misperception. Some never figure it out. They spend their lives making discoveries, crunching numbers, inventing powerful new sewage systems or engineering DNA and bask in the warmth of their lucky lives. If you want to congratulate your luck for your success, by all means do so.

  No bargains today, and I'm not in the mood to sit through the rest of the catalogue until the post-Auction cocktails. I'll come back later for my drink with my rival. I take the shabby elevator down and tip the mamasan enough that she gives me her best smile. He's gone, of course. I don't keep close track of him. The chip that the clinic doctor implanted while he was being treated for an ear infection back when he was two will let me find him any time I need to. We don't control. We simply create a path, and you follow it on your own. Because that's what you really want to do. The mamasan has air-conditioned taxis standing by and I think I'll take a drive through the real, grubby version of that flawless city you see from the upper room.

  Full circle, coming here. The irony of it is never lost on me. My mother worked in one of these sex bars, six decades ago, a runaway youngest daughter from Mumbai without much going for her. She got pregnant by a talented young CEO on vacation from Hong Kong who never acknowledged the baby.

  We look for talent where we find it. And when a path opens up in front of your feet, you walk it. Go ahead. Call it luck, if it makes you feel better.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Mary Rosenblum

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  Short Story: CUT LOOSE THE BONDS OF FLESH AND BONE

  by Ian Creasey

  The protagonist of this tale was previously seen exploring “The Edge of the Map” (June 2006), but this story's action takes place much closer to home. The tale's inspiration stems from a comment made by a fellow member of Ian's online writing group Codex www.codexwriters.com. The story has mutated in unexpected directions, however, and bears little resemblance to that original conversation.

  In the most expensive nursing home in Scotland, squeezed between the bed and the pastel walls and the racks of brain-imaging equipment, Susanna Munro slumped with fatigue in the visitors’ chair as she waited for her mother to die.

  “Don't slouch!” said her mother, as if Susanna were forty years younger. “You make my neck ache just to look at you. I've told you enough times, you should do the Alexander Technique. And put a board under your bed, it'll do wonders for your spine—”

  Susanna knew she needed her spine stiffening, but not only in the way Granny thought. She hadn't yet said what she'd been bottling up throughout the deathbed vigil. Even now, Susanna's mother—who had become Granny in family parlance after the birth of Susanna's own children—still kept rasping out instructions as fast as her ravaged lungs could suck in the air to speak with.

  “—Or there's yoga,” Granny continued after a bout of phlegmy coughing. “That'll teach you posture. I used to do yoga—I could still do the splits when I was sixty. I could have been a dancer. So could you. You were always showing off when you were a girl. I remember in the garden, you were hiding and I couldn't see you, and you said ‘Up here!’ and then you jumped right out of the tree with your arms waving. You could have broken that spine, and then you wouldn't be slouching now, would you? But I was there to catch you. I was always there. Aye, do you remember that garden in Ecclefechan? Apples and plum trees, we had. I wonder if there's any of that jam left? I'll teach you how to make it; I know you're not much of a cook, but even you can manage a pot of jam—”

  Granny's eyes clouded for a moment. Her breath sputtered, and a speck of drool trickled onto the pillow. She scratched feebly at the metal mesh that crisscrossed her head, the black wires tightly compressing her white hair as though marking out a grid for some advanced version of tic-tac-toe. You could play moles and warts, thought Susanna. Cysts and scars. Life and death.

  Just
as Susanna gathered herself to speak, the intercom chimed. “Mrs. Raeburn, it's time for your evening session with the Sensory Insertion Module. Would you like the technician to attend?”

  Granny twitched as if jolted back into life. “Oh yes, I need to practice, don't I? I'll start now—send him up later.” The com clicked off, and she laughed hoarsely. “It's just as well I could always pass exams. You have to study for everything nowadays, even death.” She pulled her arm out from under the paisley duvet, then gave her shriveled fingers a disappointed glare. “Don't just sit there, Susanna, plug me in.”

  Susanna reached for the SIM cord, and briskly inserted it into the socket behind her mother's left ear. As she bent over Granny's body, she smelled the ancient decaying flesh that the pine-scented air-conditioner tried so hard to mask. It was the stench of mortal sickness, the sign that this time—unlike so many other times when Granny had feigned illness to keep her daughter close—Susanna's mother would never get up from that bed. Not physically, anyway.

  Granny closed her eyes. Only the readouts on the SIM console moved, showing data-transfer stats. To reduce the shock of “transition” (as death was invariably called in the brochures), the nursing home's residents spent hours every day with a data-feed into their brain, simulating the post-transition experience of existing as an upload inside the secure servers of Athanatic Solutions Ltd.

  “It's getting easier,” said Granny, in a louder voice as though she felt more distant and had a subconscious need to shout. “I can see you through the security camera. Give me a wave, dear!”

  Half-heartedly, Susanna raised her hand. “Can you hear me?”

  “Of course I can. Eh, your hair doesn't look so good from up here. Have you tried getting a perm and dying it back to red? You used to have such bonny hair—it's a shame to let yourself go. Men have roving eyes, and that husband of yours ... I wouldn't trust him further than I could spit a kitten.”

  “I'll go back home then, shall I?” said Susanna tartly. “While I'm here at your bedside, who knows what he could be up to?”

  “Ah, stop mithering. You won't be here much longer. I'll not last another week. You could be back home tomorrow—and I'll be with you. In spirit, if not in body. Now, let's see if I can find your house....”

  Granny's eyelids twitched as she delved through vidlinks from the nanocams that blanketed the world: originally introduced as an anti-terrorism measure, the nanocams had become so convenient for the uploaded generation that they'd been dubbed the Eyes of the Dead.

  “There it is!” said Granny. “Looks like you've been neglecting your garden. I can see weeds in the borders—you have to pull them up whenever you walk past. Keep on top of them, or they'll get out of hand. And all your tomatoes are parched, just little green lumps. You should rig up an electric sprinkler. Then when I'm installed on your house network, I can water the tomatoes every day and give them exactly what they need.”

  The prospect made Susanna seethe. “You won't want to bother doing that. After all, you won't be eating the tomatoes.”

  “Not at first. But technology improves; they'll give me all the upgrades. If an upload can see, why can't it taste? It's just different data. Oh look—your bairns are coming out. They're running around the lawn, and they've only just had their tea. You've got to let it settle!” she yelled, forgetting that the children couldn't hear her. “Ach, you need me to babysit for you. If you're going to keep gallivanting across the globe, you need someone minding the home front.”

  “I have a husband to do that,” snapped Susanna. She left unsaid that she'd made a career in journalism precisely to avoid becoming an over-stifling mother to her children.

  “Then where is he?” said Granny. “Inside watching football on TV? Off with some tart somewhere? Your youngest is only six—she could break her leg and he wouldn't even notice!”

  “The eldest is eleven and she knows how to call someone if anything happens. Which it won't. Stop fretting! And look at me while I'm talking to you,” added Susanna, throwing back a line that her mother had shouted countless times over the years.

  Granny opened her eyes, and blinked furiously as she struggled to reconcile conflicting images from her data-feed and her physical senses. “Fretting, eh? So I'm not supposed to care about my own grandchildren? I can't imagine why you'd rather they break their leg than be properly looked after.”

  Susanna breathed deeply, attempting to defuse her anger. This kind of argument would erupt every day if she allowed Granny's electronic ghost into her house. She mustn't let that happen. But how could she refuse her mother on her deathbed? How could she break a lifetime's habit of Granny getting her own way?

  A man in a black-and-silver suit entered the room and hurried to the bed. “Mrs. Raeburn, such a pleasure to see you again. I was monitoring the SIM from downstairs—you're doing wonderfully well!” The Athanatic technicians always told Granny that she was doing wonderfully well; no doubt it formed part of the premium-rate transition service. Susanna tried not to resent the loss of her inheritance, but in her weaker moments she couldn't help thinking of other uses for all the money her mother had paid to be virtualized.

  Granny began questioning the technician about the data-feed, and Susanna took the opportunity to slip away for a few minutes. She didn't like leaving Granny alone—if her mother died with no one beside her, Susanna would never hear the last of it. The uploaded personality would add it to the long list of grievances and throw it in her face every time they argued over what time the kids should be sent to bed.

  Longing for some fresh air after the vigil in Granny's stuffy room, Susanna headed outside into the neatly maintained gardens, full of yew hedges and neoclassical statues. Decades as a journalist had filled her head with miscellaneous facts—she remembered that the yew was a symbol of immortality. The evening breeze carried the scent of roses from the formal flowerbeds. Flapping her hand to ward off midges, Susanna paced across the lawns and past a gurgling fountain, until she arrived at a stone archway with a motto incised across the span:

  Cut loose the bonds of flesh and bone

  To find the realm thy soul doth own

  Susanna's writerly instincts rebelled against the pseudo-archaic language, coined by Athanatic's marketing department less than a decade ago; her finger twitched on an imaginary Delete key as she passed under the arch and entered the necropolis beyond.

  Obelisks and tombstones and mausoleums lay crammed together in a hotchpotch of garish styles, each competing to look grander and more expensive than the next. Animated displays showed dead men's triumphs, and post-transition holograms told tales of their lifetime achievements. In the far corner, a tinny thud leaked through the sound-baffle around a goth nightclub held in the crypt of someone who felt that death made him all the more fashionable a DJ. A gaggle of teenagers in white pancaked make-up lounged on gravestones drinking cider, ignoring the holograms who tried to impart their wisdom. No lichen splotched the gravestones; no ivy shrouded the freshly chiseled monuments.

  Somewhere below Susanna's feet, a secure vault contained the infrastructure of the electronic afterlife. Supercooled computers stored the encoded personalities of the deceased, connected to their mausoleums and holograms through triply redundant cables. Uploads could maintain a local presence, but the vault's servers also accessed the Net and hence the whole world. The brochures elided delicately over the security aspects, alluding to protective firewalls and backups—since, of course, the Athanatic residents were a magnet for hackers. Many of the first generation of uploads had been zombified into human spambots touting baldness cures to distressed relatives who only wanted to ask Great-Uncle Wayne where he'd hidden the keys to the safe.

  Apart from the giggling teenagers attending the goth disco, not many people visited the memorial garden. After all, every cenotaph had its own email address, its own telephone number. Anyone wanting to contact the dead could simply dial them up on the Net. Some of the deceased passed their time offering psychic readings, spirit-gui
de services, and the like. Others wrote blogs, memoirs, or the novel they'd always planned to get round to. Susanna resented those who set themselves up as journalists, leveraging a lifetime's expertise into endless punditry and pedantry. It was already hard enough being a freelance writer, without having to compete against dead columnists who could extrude wordage with no need to eat or sleep or soothe children's squabbles or attend sick relatives’ deathbeds.

  Susanna checked her messages. No offers of work had come in. She sent a quick note to her husband and eldest daughter to tell them she'd probably stay at the nursing home tonight. Then she took a final look around the necropolis, trying to spot a tasteful style of monument that would suit Granny's personality ... and trying to find the words that would persuade Granny to stay here with her fellow ghosts.

  She imagined Granny telling those teenage girls, “I hope you don't walk upstairs on the bus wearing those short skirts.” No one would listen to her. Who cared to be hectored by the dead, other than family? How could she tell her mother that her family didn't want her? Susanna, whose whole career was built upon words, couldn't think what to say.

  “Where've you been?” asked her mother when Susanna returned. “I could have passed away, and you wouldn't even have noticed. I won't be here much longer; the least you can do is hold my hand while it's still warm.”

  Beside the bed, an Emo-Scan glowed the purple of deep indignation. Granny's helmet of wires recorded the myriad signals of neurons firing within the skull, building up a history of thought-patterns for the upload's personality algorithms. To aid the process, Granny took a daily dose of stimulants, ensuring that she could think and talk coherently in the pre-transition period.

  “I went down to the memorials,” said Susanna. “Have you decided what style you want?”

  Feebly, Granny shook her head. “I'm not having one of those mausoleums. That stuff's obsolete. Why have a bloody great monument cluttering up the place? Why have a gravestone at all? You only need a marker to remember those that are gone. But I won't be gone. I'll still be with you. Look!”