Echoes of Another

by Chandra Clarke

  Then he made the mistake of sitting down again and logging in to check his book sales.

  His sense of accomplishment vanished. Sales of his third novel had dipped noticeably, which meant his publisher’s algorithms had stopped showing the book to potential buyers. It was plummeting into obscurity, destined to languish near the bottom of the rankings in every possible category. Just like the first two.

  A horrible thought struck him… He ran a report comparing sales of his three books over time. The charts were worse than he feared. The sales decline was happening sooner after launch with each new book, and that could only mean the algorithms were giving up on him faster, based on historical results.

  He got up and kicked his chair. It had taken him years to get a publisher. Editor after editor had refused to even process his manuscript, claiming they didn’t think their software would rate it well based on his synopsis. “As I’m sure you appreciate, we have a limited budget for text analysis, and we receive tens of thousands of titles per month” was how the rejection message usually read.

  So when Seth made it past both an editor and the software and signed a contract, he thought he was set. And then they’d simply thrown his first book into the marketplace to sink or swim. That’s when he’d learnt that if a book didn’t sell at a certain rate within the first week — one week! — it wasn’t allocated any marketing budget. And if it didn’t get any funding, it sputtered through the new titles lists and then the recent release lists, becoming less and less visible until it couldn’t be found unless a reader searched for it deliberately.

  He fumed for a while longer, and then paced again, his jaw setting firm. He had always resisted going independent, because it seemed like a lot to learn and deal with: formatting for fabbers, formatting for the virtual editions, distribution, learning to use blockchain to sell and protect the book from piracy, learning marketing algorithms. Time was already hard enough to come by, what with the near-constant demands of grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews, who all seemed to think he was both unemployed and in need of a spouse. Seth had hoped to stay focused on writing with what little time he had to himself.

  But not selling books was even worse.

  Seth caught sight of his ancient workstation and laughed at himself. What was it his sister had once called him when they’d talked about his dating life and refusal to use a digital matchmaker? A fuddle-duddle? No, a fuddy-duddy. She’d called him a hypocrite too, as he was happy enough to use technology to obsess about his health. Dammit. Why was she always right about this kind of thing? Here he was trying to craft a book about someone casting aside the modern tools for creating and disseminating art, and yet Seth hadn’t explored what was available to him in real life to truly understand what he was rejecting. No wonder he was struggling to write something authentic.

  Well then. He squared his shoulders. If the choice was sink or swim… it was time he learned how to swim.

  MEIKE

  The bar countertop in the club was huge, extending perhaps ten metres to either side of where Meike sat. She watched the barbots, multi-armed automatons at their stations, swiftly pouring shots, muddling ingredients, shaking and stirring drinks for the endless lines of thirsty partiers. They were mesmerising, especially since they were weirdly synced with the music.

  The bass was intense. The dance pit was an enormous circle with a floor dusted with multi-coloured sand that vibrated into cymatic patterns in time with the beat. Whenever it looked like the action was slowing down, virtual dancers would materialise, showing off new moves and working the crowd into a fever pitch again.

  The club was the place for the wild and the exhibitionist. While most residents of Toronto were conservative about their upgrades, choosing invisible enhancements to things like mental performance, strength, or endurance, the people here wore them loud and proud. Most of it wasn’t legal, or at least, not officially reviewed and sanctioned by the Ministry of Health. If you liked what you saw, you’d have to ask around to find out which cosmetic surgeon or tattoo artist was moonlighting as a modder.

  Meike was drinking something that was purple and foaming violently down the side of her glass. She couldn’t remember if it was her fifth or sixth drink.

  Someone slid into the chair beside her. She had a shaved head, pointed ears, and tiger-striped eyes with dilated pupils. When she smiled, her teeth all had points.

  “Heya, new girl,” the stranger said. “Don’t think I’ve viewed you before.” She made of a show of looking Meike up and down. “You’re a Plain, ya? Nothing hidden under those prettay, prettay clothes? I can fix that, sure ya.”

  “No, no thanks,” Meike sipped her drink. She knew she couldn’t afford anything this woman had on offer.

  “Oh, come on now, let me at least do something for your eyes. A lot of the girls like you love the dragon eyes.”

  Meike looked around. She hadn’t realised before but there were plenty of dragon eyes in the club, some bright red, others violet. She shrugged. “Not into mods,” she lied.

  The woman’s eyes narrowed as she considered Meike. “No mods, heya. Okay fine. You not a biopunk or grinder, I don’t see no implants, and you def not a cyborg, so. Augs? You an aug? What you want I can score for you? I got all the access.”

  Meike took a longer pull of her drink. She had never seen the point in augmentations. Her job didn’t require things like strength or speed, and thanks to her androgynous features, which men always seemed to find fascinating, she’d had no trouble getting sex partners. Bigger body parts had no appeal.

  After a moment of silent thought, the woman said. “Bet you like some Feels?”

  Meike suddenly focused on her. “Maybe. What do you have?”

  The woman laughed knowingly. “Ya, I thought was so. It’s all about the experiences these days! How about some electrics? You ever try that? Just tell me for certain sure you don’t got the implants so I don’t mess them up good.” When Meike still hesitated, she added, “Is very cheap, ya? So basic.”

  Meike could feel the bass vibrating in her chest and noticed the taste of her drink for the first time that evening. “Sure,” she said.

  The woman made a gesture signalling for money. Already itching with excitement, Meike flicked a few screens on her wristband to pay the bill, and then took it off, laying it on the table so it wouldn’t be damaged.

  Transaction completed, the woman pulled a small box with a simple silver dial out of one pocket. Out of another, she took out a packet of electrodes. She paused. “You want here, or I got a room in back?”

  Meike looked around. At the next table, a short, black male with phosphorescent tattoos and super-extended fingers on each hand was chatting up another man — or was it a woman? — who had their whole face covered with electric-blue scales. No one here would care.

  Meike motioned for the woman to proceed. Moving with astonishing speed and grace, the woman’s hands snaked under Meike’s clothes here, here, and there, placing the electrodes on some of the softest, most tender parts of her body. She then set the box in front of Meike and turned the dial to the first position.

  Meike stiffened as the current hit her. She sat there for a moment, tingling, her breath quickening, and her eyes wide. Then, without warning, she gulped down her drink, grabbed the box, and cranked the dial to the top position. She stood straight up, shrieked once, felt her lips pull back into a rictus grin, and then fell down hard, convulsing, jerking and twisting herself into a ball.

  The safety kicked in and the device shut down. Her whole body shook and her chest was heaving as though she’d run a marathon. She tasted blood where she’d bitten her tongue, and her head throbbed. For a few fleeting moments, she felt everything. And then it all faded.

  Meike looked up at the woman, who had a huge smile on her face, her pointed teeth gleaming in the flashing club lights. Some people nearby had seen Meike go down and were lining up for a turn of their own.

  She needed more money. More of this.
More alive.

  KEL

  Kel sat alone in the cafeteria, moving her spoon idly through her soup, watching it swirl and eddy as the steam curled into the air. She was hungry enough, but the soup was too salty, and that made her think of the paper she’d just read about sodium channels in axonal conduction and…

  She threw down the spoon and tried sipping her coffee instead, hoping maybe the caffeine would clear the cobwebs. It was so hard to concentrate. Sure, there was the paper to finish, and she no closer to finding out what had happened to her dead macaques or her data logs, but she still had all the others, so she should be busy. The data from them — which she was now backing up in six different places, both offsite and onsite — was ticking in quite nicely. There was still so much to be done.

  Kel thought of her grandmother, Madeleine. Smart as a whip and acidly funny, Gramma Maddy had started her career as a teacher but quickly became impatient with the curriculum and the system, as she felt it wasn’t doing an adequate job of preparing her students for the future. She’d thrown everything she had into her work, rising through the ranks to become a principal, and then a superintendent, and building support and relationships in the teachers’ union. At age fifty, she ran for public office, and won her seat in the provincial legislature handily — thanks in no small part to the friends she had in the union. Within three years, she had a cabinet post as Minister of Education, where she set about overhauling the Ontario curriculum, and won a seat again.

  She would have made premier, Kel thought glumly. Or maybe even gone into federal politics and been prime minister. Who knows what she might have accomplished then? But at age sixty, disaster had struck: the first signs of early onset Alzheimer’s. Kel had been thirteen. Madeleine faced it bravely and retired from public life. The disease had been swift and ruthless: Madeleine had not seen her sixty-fifth birthday.

  Kel rubbed her eyes. The memories of that savage decline still haunted her. It was her greatest wish to prevent that kind of suffering in all people, but especially those who had dedicated their lives to making things better. Kel hated to see potential like her grandmother’s cut short. She also secretly worried about her own future. The causes of the disease were still not well understood.

  A shadow darkened her table. She looked up and tried not to groan. It was Bao-Yu, and worse, Padraig was with her. At a little past ninety, Padraig was due for retirement any day. She wished he would. He drove Kel nuts, as he seemed to spend all his time here wandering around and chatting with people, interrupting whatever they were working on. Bao-Yu was always asking her strange personal questions, but at least she did it on breaks.

  “Such a frowny face,” Padraig said, sitting down across from her without waiting for an invitation. “You should smile more, you know.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Kel said, resisting the urge to plaster on a fake smile to appease him. “But it’s been a rough week.”

  “Well actually,” Padraig said, “the sun has been shining and spring isn’t far off. So really, there’s nothing to complain about.” Bao-Yu chuckled, as she too sat down.

  Kel bit back a sharp reply, knowing it would only bring out an hour’s worth of unsolicited advice. She moved to stand. “Yes, well. I should probably enjoy some of the sunshine. If you’ll exc—”

  “I heard you had a spot of trouble with your baboons?”

  She gripped the handle of her coffee cup a little tighter. She knew if she left now, Padraig would take offence and complain to Robert, Bao-Yu would back him, and also make the next staff meeting exceptionally difficult. Staff meetings already went on forever. But she wanted to try to get some work done as the caffeine worked its magic.

  “Cute little apes, I always thought.” Padraig smiled up at her though his eyes didn’t crinkle.

  “Macaques,” she said as she relaxed back into the seat again. “They’re macaques. And yes, two of them died, out of the blue.”

  “That’s terrible!” said Bao-Yu. “Did you lose much data?”

  “A lot of potential data,” Kel replied. “It won’t cripple the project but it is demoralising.”

  “They’re not as interesting as, say, Shinisaurus crocodilurus, but cute,” said Padraig, carrying on as though she and Bao-Yu hadn’t been talking. “You do understand what that is, don’t you?”

  “Yes, the Chinese crocodile lizard. You’ve mentioned a few times before,” Kel said.

  He folded his arms across his chest. “Remind me what your little project is about again?”

  “My long-term study,” Kel said, trying not to overdo the emphasis on the last word, “is looking at monkey and ape resistance to tauopathy and AD-related neurodegeneration. Or in other words, they get senile plaques, same as we do, but don’t seem to have the same issues we do. I’m studying brain development and degeneration in real time.”

  “Ah yes, your implants,” Padraig said, raising a finger. “That will be the problem.” Bao-Yu looked at him quizzically.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Implants. Never a good idea. That’s why your monkeys died.”

  “But all of them have im—”

  “All this modding and augging and such like. Messes with the head. There’s a reason our brains are encased in skulls. It’s as much to keep stuff out as to keep other things in. Bypassing that and the blood-brain barrier? Flooding the brain with nanoparticle transmitter agents? Recipe for disaster. Your monkeys probably went nuts and killed each other. We gotta stop messing with this sort of thing.”

  “You realise,” Bao-Yu leaned over to Padraig to nudge him conspiratorially. “Kel doesn’t have any implants. She told me once. She’s that smart naturally! Isn’t she lucky?”

  Padraig snorted. “So you won’t have any yourself, but you inflict them on your animals?”

  Kel blinked. “What? Super-high resolution tomography is safe and has been for years. And I thought you were a scientist? How can you not want to know what’s going on inside and out?”

  Padraig rose stiffly. “There’s no call to be that way about it. And anyway, I don’t see how I could do anything like that, what with your never-ending torrents of data making everything in this facility move like molasses in January. I don’t understand why you need to record every single thing each of those little ape brains does every day.” With that, he huffed out of the room.

  Kel sat there feeling stunned, not knowing what to make of the conversation. Did he really not approve of implants, or was that just an excuse to complain about Kel’s resource use? And that was the second time she’d had someone mention that. Did all the staff feel that way?

  Bao-Yu reached over and patted her arm. “Oh, don’t mind him. You know how he gets if he hasn’t had his afternoon tea. But heaven forbid you should remind him to drink some, or he’s worse.”

  They laughed and parted company, with Kel headed to her desk. The whole thing left her unsettled though, and she kept sneaking looks at all of her co-workers. Just how strongly did any of them feel about her work?

  MAURA

  Coming back into her office, Maura was disturbed to find an alert flashing at her desk. Someone had been in her office while she was out.

  She sat down and logged into her computer to access security footage. To her astonishment, it had been Pauline. When had she slipped out of the meeting to come back here? Why?

  In the video, Pauline entered Maura’s office, looked at her wristband — noting the time, maybe? — and then glanced around the room, as though debating something. Then she walked across the office to the wall opposite Maura’s desk to take a close look at the Van Gogh print there. She consulted her wristband again, this time asking it about the print, querying as to whether it was an original or not, and who it was by. She did the same thing with the other two art prints, studying them for a few minutes, and then she walked over to Maura’s desk. She examined the sculpture on Maura’s desk closely.

  Maura leaned forward at her desk to watch the image of Pauline try bringing up Maura’s co
mputer. It wouldn’t respond. Maura nodded, satisfied. The computer wasn’t even visible on the office network, making it impossible to access from elsewhere, and Maura had it set up to appear only for her, even in the safety of her own office. She watched Pauline drumming her fingers on the desk.

  Pauline went to the fabber next. While Maura’s tea preferences were well known within the company, she had never asked her assistants to get anything else. Pauline accessed the fabber settings, and — Maura zoomed in — checked out the order history. Interesting. Maura ate breakfast and lunch here most days, but never dinner. Pauline would have found frequent prints of arepa and cachapa, among other things, both of which were Venezuelan. Maura rubbed her chin. She made a mental note to check outbound queries to Canadian immigration services to see if Pauline was looking up her immigration records.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” said a voice from the door in the video. The suddenness of it made Maura jump even though she wasn’t the one snooping, and she laughed at herself.

  Pauline turned to see a security guard glaring at her. “Oh, hello,” she said casually. “Yes, I’m her executive assistant. I don’t believe we’ve met. I had a problem with this unit earlier, and I was just taking a moment to see whether it was my error or whether I need to get it serviced.” Smooth, Maura thought. Cool under pressure, too.

  The guard glared even harder. “Yes, I know who you are. And Ms Torres has no exceptions to the rule about visitors to her office in her absence. None. Get out.”

  “Oh dear,” said Pauline, taken aback by the guard’s rudeness. “I’ll have to talk to her about that. In the meantime, though, we don’t want you getting into trouble, do we?” She smiled as she walked to the door. The guard’s stance did not soften one bit. Maura made another note to herself about a surprise gift for the guard.

  She watched Pauline leave the office. Maura quickly reviewed the camera views in the hallways and saw Pauline’s retreating form head back to her own office, close the door and lean against it, puffing out her cheeks with what looked like a relieved breath. Then she straightened her clothes, exited, and apparently returned to the meeting they’d all just attended.