Echoes of Another

by Chandra Clarke

  Maura checked the footage of the brainstorming meeting. Pauline had left when they were all engaged in their discussion about new titles for the games division; her absence was no longer than a trip to the bathroom would have been, and Maura sensed that even without the interruption, Pauline wouldn’t have been very much longer at it. The question was, why hadn’t she thought about video surveillance? Pauline seemed too smart to get caught out by something that obvious. And why investigate artwork, of all things?

  It was a puzzle. And Maura wasn’t sure whether she liked it or not.

  RAY

  Shivering. Teeth chattering. A hand like a lead weight on his shoulder, shaking him.

  A woman leaned over him.

  “Wake up. Come on. Snap to.”

  A slap on the face. He groaned. His ears rang.

  “Officer! What on earth do you think you’re doing? There’s no need to—” a voice said

  “Get lost. Go nurse someone.” The woman.

  “Mwita, find the ward superintendent. And security. Quickly!”

  Another slap. He opened his eyes again. The female officer glared down at him.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  The room spun around him.

  “What were you doing downtown?”

  “This patient is in no condition for interrogation!”

  “Did you set off the bomb?”

  “You said you were just going to look at the patient!” said the other voice. “Do you even have authorisation to do that much? This can’t be standard procedure! Why are you being so rough? What’s your sergeant’s name?”

  Somewhere off to his left, there was a machine, beeping at him again. The beeps were coming faster.

  “I don’t like it when things blow up on my beat. Who are you? We haven’t had this kind of nonsense here for years, and I’m not about to let it happen again. Who are you?” the officer demanded.

  In the distance, there was shouting.

  The woman leaned closer. Her uniform was bright blue. She held a tablet up to his face. It displayed an image of a body.

  “Who is this?” she shouted.

  Mick… Most of his hair and clothes had burned away. An arm had sheared off at the shoulder. He could see ribs. Part of the pelvis, shocking white against the red and black mass.

  The room stopped spinning, and an ice-cold ball of sick formed in his stomach. He gagged, and the officer stepped back in a hurry.

  He gagged again, and the gag turned into a retch and the retch turned into a gasping dry heave. He tried to turn over, to curl into a ball, but he couldn’t. The sheet over his body bloomed red in several places.

  He couldn’t stop heaving and then he couldn’t start breathing.

  More people. Shouting. A scuffle. The beeps blended into one long whine.

  Blackness.

  MEIKE

  It was just after four in the afternoon when the low sun slanted across Meike’s face, making her groan. Her head pounded and her mouth tasted like warm copper and electric tingles. She flung an arm over her eyes and lay there, cursing whoever had sold her whatever it was she’d tried last night.

  Eventually, she sat up. Her room was the same beige colour it had been when she had moved in. There was a cheap dresser, a cheaper end table, and her bed; her walls were devoid of pictures and decorations. Her bathroom and kitchen were also bare and plain.

  Two floors below her apartment in the basement, the deejay in Club Rax fired up the night’s first set of binaural beats. The building thrummed in resonance.

  Meike stumble-slid out of bed to the window to look down. The stream of pods along Church had slowed to a trickle as people jaywalked from one edge of the flow to another, and the sidewalks were filling up.

  On the far side of the flow was a long, low row of tidy modder shops with enormous windows, each painted a different colour of the rainbow. In Jackson’s, a Baxter unit was airbrushing a sunset onto a man’s bare chest. A crowd gathered outside the window at Digitz to watch a teenager get magnets implanted into her fingertips. At Black Eagle, the night’s featured rentbot was a blond male; threesomes were on discount.

  Meike felt a wave of something that could have been nausea, or maybe hunger. She pulled on some clothes and slipped out of her apartment, taking the lift rather than trusting herself on the stairs. Cold, damp air slithered into her clothing the moment she stepped outside, the kind that always made her ache.

  Kaiten Noodle beckoned, mostly because there wasn’t a line yet. The interior was garish: all bright red and lemon yellow and black. The room was huge and tightly packed; a long, continuous conveyor belt-track snaked and looped its way through the restaurant, beginning and ending in the kitchen. The tables squeezed up against it.

  The welcome detector at the door identified her as a party of one and told her to go to table seven. As she sat down, a section of the table angled up, offering her a touch screen filled with brightly illustrated food choices. She ordered champon and a triple Suntory whiskey, then waved her wristband across the scanner to pay. As she waited for her meal, she alternated between rubbing her temples with her fingers and dragging the knuckles of her thumbs across her eyebrows to ease her headache.

  Her meal made its lonely way out of the kitchen on the conveyor belt. She picked it up as it trundled close, inhaled the steam.

  “That looks good, which one is it?” said a voice behind her.

  She turned around. A young man, perhaps Chinese or Malaysian — or possibly both — was smiling at her. He wore a few days’ growth of facial hair and had a sweet face.

  Meike went back to her food. “Number six special.”

  “May I join you?”

  She shrugged. After a moment’s hesitation, he sat across from her. He ordered the same as she had, and then sat back, looking at her closely. “Do you remember me?” he asked. “From last night?”

  Meike stopped eating long enough to inspect him. “Could be,” she said. “Maybe. I was pretty hacked, I think.”

  The man nodded. “You were. My name is Fa. We met at the club. We had a good time.” His order reached the table, so he stopped to grab it. “You, uh, well, you were saying some pretty brass things.”

  Meike slurped up noodles. “Was I?” she said. “Like what?”

  “‘The lie is a condition of life’ was one. And something like ‘We delude ourselves. Our lives are of no significance.’ You said a lot more, but those are the two lines that stuck. It all sounded crazy deep.”

  She raised her glass and threw back a gulp of whiskey, closing her eyes to savour how it burned in her throat. When she opened them again, Fa was staring at her with frank fascination. “Not anything I wrote,” she said simply. “Just stuff I’ve read. Sartre. Nietzsche.”

  “Philosophers, right?” Fa asked. She nodded. “You’ve read a lot of it? Philosophy, I mean?”

  “Pretty much all of it. Studied most of the world religions, too.”

  “Wow. Even Voodoo?” He grinned.

  “Yeah. And Taoism. And a bunch of others.”

  Fa scooped up some of his meal. “Which ones did you like?” he asked between bites.

  “Who knows? They all sound the same to me,” she replied.

  He picked up his drink, something bubbly, and stirred it a few times with a stainless steel straw. “I’ve been reading this guy named Campbell. He’s talking about all the common elements in religions and the hero’s journey. I really want an epic journey of my own. I’m trying to get tickets to this year’s Burning Man. So hard to find since they clamped down.” He looked at her. “You read this stuff for school or work?”

  “Nah. I’m just a lab tech.”

  “Why did you become a lab technician?”

  “It pays enough to buy drugs,” she said flatly.

  Fa choked on his drink and laughed. “Really? Are you serious? You’re something else.” She shrugged again, nodded, and ate some more dinner.

  He talked for a long time, about his parents, about how he wan
ted to learn about this Sartre guy, and how he’d been thizzing last night on Ecstasy. He described a book about perception by Huxley, which he said made him want to try peyote now. She let the words wash over her and ordered another triple whiskey.

  When she finished, Meike leaned back and considered him. In her whiskey-fuelled haze, she wondered how you could read Campbell and get nothing but a yen for festival tickets out of it. But he was quite lean, a little on the short side, and well muscled. His hair was a deep black and very thick; he’d let it get wavy at the back. He smelled good. And it had been a while. So when he finally got around to saying he wanted to get to know her better, she said yes. They went to his place.

  KEL

  There.

  Kel slumped back, at once thrilled to have found something yet dismayed it was there to find.

  The sun was rising outside. She was alone in the lab again as she hadn’t gone home last night. On the screen was the implant log for Max, showing thousands upon thousands of data points, all transmitted by the implant to the lab computers.

  All inputs, except for one line. An output. Somehow, her implant had been used to send something from the transmitter to the brain and it changed the macaque’s behaviour. Pure noise, it looked like, and she guessed it would have been just enough to cause Max to freeze in confusion. There were several of these, scattered at random intervals throughout the log, but this was the last one, and it happened not long before the implant ceased transmitting.

  She reviewed the time stamp for the signals and checked the corresponding point on the video logs. Max wasn’t always in view of the camera, but whenever he was, he paused at exactly the same moment the signal hit him. Each time, for a few seconds afterwards, he looked around vacantly, like someone who had come into a room but forgotten what they were there to do.

  Max was a swinger, spending nearly all day flinging himself from tree to tree. He’d plunged to his death when one of those outputs had struck.

  Now knowing what she was looking for, she checked Dalton’s log and found identical signals. Indeed, there were more in Dalton’s records, but then again, he spent more time on the ground. It would have taken longer to kill him.

  Kel paused, stunned by her own thoughts. At the moment, all she had was evidence of something happening with the implants. What made her think of the word killed rather than died?

  She took a swig from the mug on her desk, and made a face at the cold coffee. It was the same feeling that had prompted her to look at the implant logs again, she mused. Padraig’s antipathy. Two macaques dying suddenly. The missing log for Pika. She recalled a conversation with one of her undergraduate professors. She’d just shown her the results of tests for a new radiographic contrast agent she had proposed, which would be less toxic than the industry standard, and cheaper, too.

  “This is good.” Professor Ramesh had nodded. “The methodology looks solid. Go ahead, write this up, and show me the draft. We’ll see about getting it submitted. I wouldn’t make a big deal out of this in class though.”

  “Why not?” Kel asked.

  Ramesh cocked an eyebrow at her. “This isn’t typical of undergrad work in general, much less someone of your age. At least two-thirds of the class are only there because it’s a requirement. If any of the rest of them are looking at grad school and becoming researchers, they will resent you for beating them to this kind of original research. As it is, surely you’ve noticed they aren’t exactly thrilled to have you in class? You always know the answers.” Kel had puzzled over that for a while. With all the problems in the world, why wouldn’t they be excited over something that would help make things better, even if only in a small way?

  As for how they treated her, Kel hadn’t noticed. Her mother had chastised her more than once for being unable to provide information about her classmates, what they looked like or what they did in their time out of class. But Kel had never really seen the point in paying attention to such details. In her view, lecture halls were temporary gatherings of people she was not likely to see again once the course was over at the end of term. Why waste time with gossip? But now, she was second-guessing herself… Had they felt like Padraig did?

  She shook her head, berating herself for being foolish. Everyone knew Padraig was prickly, even more so now with his retirement looming. This was a lack of sleep and stress making her overthink things.

  Robert blammed through the office door. His eyes narrowed as he spotted her at her desk. “I took a breakfast meeting with a friend of mine in the Ministry of Finance,” he said, biting off every word. “And rumour has it big cuts are coming unless each project can show they’re working towards a commercial application or a significant public-private partnership.”

  “What? Wasn’t the last federal budget running a surplus? What do they need to make cuts for?”

  “I couldn’t begin to guess.” Robert ran a hand across his face, rubbing his eyes. “It will be this government’s first budget. My friend figures the thinking is to take credit for the surplus of the previous government by making it even bigger for the first few years and then spending all the savings on a big and popular initiative right before their term is up. Or something. Who knows?” He shoved his hands in his pocket. “At least we’ve had a tipoff. But what it means is the last three weeks I spent on our budget were a complete waste of time, and we’ve got less than a month to come up with something plausible. Staff meeting in an hour.”

  RAY

  It was nice here, in the darkness. Warm, and the pain was only a background noise, like rushing water.

  He’d been thirteen when his brother Cedric was born.

  Things had been okay for a while, just then.

  Because of Peter. A good man.

  Peter, who had seen… something in Mom and decided to try to save it. Ray had never worked out what to call Peter. Uncle didn’t seem right, and neither did stepdad. He regretted it now, not giving him a proper relationship name.

  Kind eyes, a firm jaw and a steady job. Hope. Dreams. Peter. Hints that things were different in other places. And you could leave here and go to those places.

  Laughing! Peter laughed. A lot.

  Eating every day!

  Mom did not laugh. But for a while, Ray didn’t want to hide from her all the time.

  A day in April. Rain outside. Ray watching the birth from across the hall in his bedroom. His mum, screaming in agony, begging Peter to make it stop. He wondered if this was why she hated Ray. Why hadn’t they gone to a hospital? He had never thought about it until now. Perhaps because his mum was sure the spooks would get her. She was always talking about them, although Ray didn’t know what those were.

  Cedric, they called him. A tiny, squalling, almost blue thing.

  Peter and tears of joy.

  Ray holding Cedric. Terror at the thought of holding a… a… someone in his arms. Once, when no one was looking, bringing Cedric extra close and feeling his heart beating. Who knew babies were so soft?

  That day.

  Coming home, after a day in the May sunshine, feeling like he’d never felt. Like maybe, just maybe, good things could happen.

  Peter, on the floor in the centre of the apartment, moaning, crooning, tears and snot streaming down his face, cuddling Cedric, stiff and still in his arms.

  Ray knew, almost immediately.

  His mother was using again, and it had been Cedric who had absorbed all her rage.

  He should have stayed home.

  He was bigger than Cedric.

  MAURA

  Maura’s spacious personal pod swept silently down the Bridle Path and then slowed to turn into the entrance of her estate. The black wrought-iron gates slid open, allowing the pod to follow the curve of the driveway to the front door where it pulled to a stop. It waited a few moments before making a polite ping to alert Maura they had arrived.

  She looked up from her work, surprised as always by how short the trip seemed. She bent over to pick up her bag, her synth leather seat creaking. Mau
ra slid a hand along the burnished wood accents of the handle, found the button, and the pod door purred open. She got out and headed for the house while the pod slipped around back to park itself in the garage. The front door opened at her approach, and the lights in the bright foyer came on for her. She let out a little sigh of contentment, as the sight of her home coming alive to greet her never failed to make her day.

  She’d fallen in love with the place as soon as she had seen the listing. It was a house of geometry, all rectangles, and straight lines, and symmetry. The outside was faux-Edwardian, while the interior was early twenty-first century, old enough now to be retro chic again. The palette was soothing creams and warm, dark browns. It gave her a sense of solidity, and order, and spoke of wealth without being as ridiculously ostentatious as some other homes on the Path. And most important, it was so very different from the chaos of her own upbringing.

  She set her bag down on the lone, oval table in the foyer and walked into the main hallway, her hard shoes clicking on the marble tile. She took the staircase, a minimalist curving work of art all by itself, up to the second floor. Her DPA had already embodied itself in its mobile form and was waiting for her in the master bathroom, having laid out a fresh towel and her housecoat. The humanoid unit was dressed casually, in pale slacks and a long-sleeved blue shirt open at the neck. The bathtub was filling itself, the water heated to the temperature she preferred.

  “Jarvis, what do we have in the way of Malbec tonight?”

  Jarvis’ head tilted slightly, indicating he was accessing the inventory. “We still have a few bottles left from the case of Catena Zapata. Should I get one?”

  “That would be perfect. Decant a bottle on the kitchen table, please. And pick a paired selection from the fabber to go with it. I’ll be in here for about twenty minutes.”