Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-07

by Penny Publications

  Holy shit—the whole Arkive? How the hell are we gonna eat now? Don't see how vending refillers'll run, and we don't got the heavies, or the weapons, to compete with real looters!

  Fisher squeezes my shoulder. Wish he wouldn't—I don't wanna cry with everybody watching. I shove the Locker with my foot.

  "We turn her in to them, we can get a reward maybe. She can out whoever did this."

  The Locker's desperate-eyed, shaking her head. Reminds me of her "greater good," and the Pit Boss going on about lies. Somebody said "test populations," too, I heard that one somewhere before—but it's all just terrorist talk, right? I kick her a swift one.

  "Maybe, but who's 'them'?" Daddy asks. "We know someone who might come looking for her, and he could send a lot of police down here if he wanted. A few local stations are back up and running on their own generators."

  Right, Mister Questions. "Well, he might come alone, cause the police're probably busy in a citywide panic. Plus they don't like him."

  Sugarboss crosses heavy arms. "They don't?"

  "Well, one of 'em doesn't. Checkers Nayyar." But that police generator, now— that must be the reason I can still power textnet with everything else down. I enter the security-key to see if my housekeeping mindware's still running, and there it sits, the Police hub, tasty as a big fat muffin. They must not expect anyone else online, cause texting in's simple.

  URGENT SERGEANT NAYYAR REQUESTED TO UN-DER-BRIDGE NORTH PYLON FOR REPORT AND APPRE-HEND PRISONER. PARKASH SINGH MEHRA.

  751864 SGT. NAYYAR: HOW CAN YOU BE ON HERE? ON MY WAY.

  I put hands on my hips. "She's coming."

  That gets a reaction. Nobody round here likes checkerbobbies—plenty get pissed, but others don't wanna leave now that they've been disconnected. Turban-Daddy, Sugarboss and the Tangletown Maestra sketch out a news-passing plan, messy but enough to get people on their way, so the Hub's mostly empty by the time Checkers Nayyar stoops in with two officers behind her.

  Grim face actually makes her look good, a queen outta legend in a navy checkered disguise.

  "Mr. Singh Mehra, you called me?" She looks my way. "I take it this is your daughter, Ms. Awo Mehra-Adanu?"

  Never been called that in my life. "Hub Girl," I say. "I called you. This here's the woman who's been locking kids off the Arkive for near a month, and she knows Amubi, the one behind the hack that shut everything down." The Locker looks desperate again, but it's Nayyar's eyes that're getting to me; I take a deep breath. "Both of them got some link to that detective guy you been dealing with, the slick one who made you question Harkara. He's in on the mayor's disappearance, so you better investigate him, too."

  Checkers Nayyar blinks, stares, then gives a harsh laugh. "I see you have a talent for finding connections. Take the prisoner outside." The two officers stand the Locker up. Nayyar raises an eyebrow at the wire baling. "And give her some proper zipcuffs."

  I'm not gonna feel guilty for that. "We did what we had to. We been the victims till just today. And there'd better be a reward, too, cause we're awful hungry."

  "Awo," Daddy says, "You can't expect—"

  Checkers Nayyar raises a hand. "Young lady, the city's in chaos right now. We have to get it under control, and then figure out how valuable your... arrest... was in the process."

  Fuck that—that could take a month! "What about your special detective?"

  Her look cools. "Implicating someone like him takes unequivocal evidence, Ms. Awo."

  That asshole! He's gonna get away, unless—"Well, I got evidence," I say.

  I'd better. Gotta be a way to access hard storage directories from housekeeping level; I know that vid footage's still here somewhere. Maybe if I...

  Oh my God.

  I don't recognize the inside of my head. I shoot the vid footage to Nayyar on autopilot, but my eye's somewhere else: I got shitloads of new storage suddenly, every bit of it full, files and files, all labeled.

  It scares the hell outta me, cause Test Population Political Priming Experiment is right on top.

  "Officer Nayyar. I know what the Locker's been up to." Falls outta my mouth. My hands start shaking. "She must've had some plan, cause she's been stashing data. Loads of it, here in my head. Bet you there's more in every one of us kids." Behind me, the whole gang mutters in shock, but I'm way beyond that.

  Speechless.

  Right at the top, a list of conspirators' names, all fat cat folks I seen on the news. They been pulling a hack right over the whole city's eyes: overflashing spiders, mold, slime, bloodsuckers, and other crap too fast to see, whenever their people see or hear something the fat cats don't want 'em to like. Hacked CustomEyes is what's been making 'em all so spooked—the exact same crap I cleared outta Tabby-Face when she first came down. Hacked by politicians! And the best part has to be said out loud.

  "There was no mayor at all, Officer Nayyar. It was your slick detective wearing hacked non-Customables like a dirty coat, cause the power brokers'd hacked so many folks, made 'em so scared of each other they were good as locked, and no real person could bring 'em back together."

  She and Daddy stare mouth-open. You'd have to be on meds to make up this kinda shit, fact—but Nayyar's eyes're flicking, testing her own systems, and when they stop I can tell she knows it's true.

  "There's much more, Officer Nayyar. Peek in my head if you want. But you better not handme-download, cause you wouldn't want this stashed anywhere that detective might be able to see."

  "Ms. Awo..."

  "Call me Hub Girl."

  Nayyar shakes herself. "Hub Girl, it looks like I'm going to need to contact some outside people, and I'll need your cooperation." She looks round. This time, sees all us kids. "You'll all need protection, too."

  "Look," I say. "We're still connected—we could message for you, if you can make sure they don't find us. And give us some food, and clothes."

  Big Fisher mumbles, "We could use those any time." I find his hand and squeeze.

  Nayyar's eyes flash pity, but her grim determined look is back. "And that reward you mentioned."

  That's more like it. When we nab these guys, it's gonna be a big one.

  * * *

  Who Killed Bonnie's Brain?

  Daniel Hatch | 11863 words

  "Scientist declared dead."

  That was the headline.

  "ROCKVILLE—The brain of information technology scientist Bonnie Bannister ceased functioning Saturday evening, according to a report from the chief state medical examiner's office. Bannister was born in 1949 and was considered to be 107 years old."

  And that was the lead. Most people don't read much beyond that point, but you keep writing anyway.

  "Bannister, whose brain was removed and retained on life support in 2043, was declared dead by the medical examiner. After the removal, Bannister continued working in the IT field for 13 years. She was credited with major advances in artificial intelligence during that time, including the development of stand-alone AIs."

  And summing someone up in a single paragraph is always a heartbreaker. As if you could pack a whole life—or in Bonnie Bannister's case, a piece of it—into fifty words.

  "She was predeceased by her parents, two husbands, three daughters, and a granddaughter. She was survived by a great-grandson, David Poole, of Rockville. A memorial service is being planned by colleagues in the IT field, the location and time are to be announced."

  That's where the news obit and the paid obit overlap.

  And here's where it doesn't:

  "Police are investigating the circumstances surrounding the end of Bannister's brain functions. No details of the investigation have been released."

  That was what I posted on the Rockville Inquirer newsite on Monday morning after the death of Bonnie Bannister's brain.

  I didn't want to use the word "death" in the news obit. Too many groups claim that you die when they take the brain out of your body, they're vocal about their position, and I didn't want the comments section to fill up with their
complaints.

  But if you don't belong to one of those groups, you have no problem with referring to what happened as the death of Bonnie Bannister.

  I wasn't that interested in the story at the time.

  I didn't know who Bannister was. I didn't know anything about her accomplishments. And I hadn't known there was a prominent IT scientist living in Rockville. Or had been, now that she wasn't living.

  I was ready to forget the story and move on to something else. And then I got a message inviting me to an address on North Park Street that changed everything. It was Bonnie Bannister's address, and it came from her housemate, a retired judge who appeared to be as old as she was.

  The morning did not start well. I should have had a doughnut for breakfast.

  But getting a doughnut means going down to the dark diner across the square from the courthouse. Personally, I don't see the sense in banning the dining clubs in the kilo towers from serving doughnuts when it's still legal to make them elsewhere. Of course, a lot of the food laws don't make sense. Bacon, for example, is proscribed everywhere (even though they still serve it in the dark diners).

  No, I had to try a quick pass through the dining club and pick up some coffee and a banana.

  And instead, I ran into Ed and Mary Parker from the tower committee.

  "Hi, Frank. Could we speak to you for a moment?"

  They made my ears ring. They made my headring ring. I took off my hat—and the head-ring inside the brim—so they had to walk over to me instead of ringing me from across the club.

  I wanted to tell them I was on deadline, but then I'd have to dread running into them every time I got hungry.

  "What can I do for you, Ed?" I replied, using that phony tone of concern that I always got from public relation flacks.

  "It's about your parents, Frank," Mary said. "They've been in North Carolina for more than a year now. And we were just wondering when they were coming back. I mean, it's an awfully large apartment for just one person. And if they're not coming back, we... I mean, the committee was thinking that you might want to think about selling back their holding."

  "I think they'll be back next month," I said, lying. "At least that's what they were saying last time I talked to them."

  "Are you sure? Because Ginnie Gilchrist was saying they love Wilmington and don't ever want to leave it."

  "Pretty sure," I said. "But I'll ask them about it next time we talk. Now I've got to run."

  I smiled as I started putting distance between us. The more, the better. Sell their holding indeed. If they did that, where would I live?

  I went off for a doughnut anyway, down the shadowy street that runs behind the Mark Twain kilotower.

  Rockville, back in its day, when the mills were new and running, was home to a couple thousand people. Those same streets today have to deal with twelve thousand—the original population living in the original, now historic, housing and the residents of the town's ten kilotowers.

  The towers, each about ten stories high and holding a thousand people, make the town a thriving urban center. But at the same time they fill the sidewalks and streets with too many people and cast long shadows.

  My favorite dark diner is down on Brooklyn Street. This month, it belonged to a guy named Bud. The storefront has tinted windows and no signs, but everyone knows what it is. The place was jammed and it took me five minutes to get an apple fritter and get out.

  I hoofed it back up past the train station. A string of four cars rolled by while I waited at the corner. Then I made my way up the hill, past Town Hall, and up Park Street to Talcott Park itself.

  By the time I got to the park, I was beginning to sweat, even though it was a cool morning in September. I'm on the south side of thirty, but Rockville is built into the side of a ridge rising from the east side of the Connecticut River Valley. The only flat ground in town is down around the train station.

  The park was full, but not crowded. Couples with children. Young men with dogs. Toddlers with their nannies. And over in one corner, a bunch of teenagers were rehearsing the dueling scene from "Romeo and Juliet." Tybalt had just been run through and was giving his "not so deep as a well" speech. When I started high school, they were still working on big Broadway musicals. By the time I was done, it was all Shakespeare all the time. I think the Bard App had something to do with it. Plays are a lot easier with someone whispering the lines through your headring.

  My destination was just a block beyond the park. I'd been looking down at it all my life. From my room in the tower, I could see across the rooftops and over the treetops in the park to the big brick mansion on the hillside, with its high walls and gabled grey roof and narrow chimneys. I never thought I'd be invited inside.

  The sign on the low sprawling building at the gate said "Carriage House," but it looked like it was built over a garage. Beyond it was a wide, poorly maintained parking lot that climbed toward the house itself. There were no gates and no guards, so I walked on past the Carriage House and crossed the parking lot.

  A long brick wall held back the hillside beyond the house. Behind an iron gate, a stairway led uphill, but the head of the stairs was boarded up. Probably some decades ago by the look of it.

  The mansion itself was long and rectangular and the red bricks looked freshly washed. White federal columns framed the windows. From the front door, I could see a well-tended garden at the far end, sheltered by the brick wall, with large planters along the walkway.

  After looking up and down for a long while, admiring the layout, I pressed the doorbell button at the big front door.

  The woman who answered the bell was tall, taller than me by far even though I'm not a small guy, and big-shouldered. She wore a grey uniform with a quilted silk jacket and a nametag that read "Abigail." She looked just a little Asian—probably part-Chinese. Her eyes were red and her face puffy, like she'd been crying.

  "Can I help you?"

  "I have an invitation from Judge Adams," I said. I fished the flimsy textprint out of my pocket and offered it to her.

  "It says you are his next-of-kin," the woman said.

  "That's what it says," I replied.

  She looked me up and down, then stepped back and let me into the foyer.

  "Wait here," she said, before stepping through the door on the far side of the highceilinged room. A wide staircase spiraled around one end of the foyer, up to a railinged balcony. The walls were a deep shade of magenta. Halfway up the stairs, in the middle of the semicircular wall, was a small hand-painted image of a centaur carrying a kidnapped nymph on his back.

  After a couple of minutes, the door opened and a new girl came through. She was short with small, sharp features and curly dark hair, and she wore a lavender jacket with pink lace epaulets spilling from the shoulders. Her nametag read "Gaby."

  "Sorry about Abigail. We're all still a little shook up about Bonnie, and Abigail was her personal nurse. You can come with me," she said. "Judge Adams is expecting you."

  She led me through a short hall into a large room with rough-textured walls. I stopped and touched the nearest wall.

  "It's leather wallpaper," she said, beckoning me on, through a small study with two comfortable-looking chairs facing a fireplace, with a large ornate chandelier centered on a threefoot-wide disk. "And that's mostly gold," she noted when she caught me inspecting the chandelier.

  "Through here," she said, holding the door into another large room. I could see layers of dark woodwork in columns, ceiling beams, and wall paneling. "It used to be the library, then it was the bar, and now it's sort of a library again. The judge is in there."

  "Thank you," I said as I stepped past her into the doorway. She smiled.

  The ceiling was low and dark, coffered into many deep boxes. Light streamed in from the southeast through old-fashioned sash windows. No longer a library, it didn't have many books. No longer a bar, it didn't have glasses or bottles of liquor. On a polished white table, surrounded by tubes and pipes and equipment and monitors,
all clustered together at end of the room away from the windows, was a large stainless steel container. It reminded me of one of those antique coffee urns you see in a really old restaurant.

  "Welcome to Maxwell Court!" boomed a man's voice, apparently from a high-quality sound system that filled the room without being unpleasant. My guide had closed the door as she left, and I was alone in the room. Or not.

  I'd googled Judge Franklin Adams as soon as I got his note. He'd been "disembodied" for more than a decade now. I assumed the stainless steel container held his remaining vital parts.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "It was built in 1904 by Francis Maxwell, one of the owners of the Hockanum Mills Company at the time. Designed by Charles Adams Platt—one of the greatest landscape architects of his day. When the mills closed and the Maxwells were gone, the Elks Club picked the place up and used it as their lodge for decades. And when they moved to their new digs in one of the towers, Bonnie picked it up for a song. I used to be her lawyer in another century. When I... made the change... she invited me to move in with her."

  "That's what I've read," I said. "It's a nice place."

  "That depends," the judge said. "If you're stuck in one room for the rest of time, it's not as nice."

  "I suppose not," I said. "So, are we really related? Your note said I was your next of kin."

  "A fortunate coincidence of names," the judge said. "You're Benjamin Adams. I'm Franklin Adams. There are probably thousands of Adamses kicking around New England."

  "I'm actually descended from the famous ones," I said. "The presidents. I like to sing the song my own way. 'This land is my land, this land is my land, this land's not your land, this land is my land.'"

  A strange barking sound came out of the speakers in the woodwork. I took it as laughter.

  "Very good. My people are from Maine. And there's probably a chance that we really are related. A couple of cranky old Yankees, we are."

  "Yes, we are," I said. "But that's probably not why you asked me here. Or why you sent me a textprint note instead of contacting me directly."