Scions of Sacrifice

by Eric Kent Edstrom

  “My mind is a simulation,” she said. “The computer controls it. Maybe there’s a bug in my programming.”

  Vaughan shrugged. “Then accept it.”

  Fury rose in her like magma in a volcano. “Easy for you to say.” She flicked the bird from her hands. It caught flight and gave an angry warble before flying out of sight somewhere below the platform. “Why should I just accept it? Why should I just accept that even here—in this totally fake world—I can’t be happy?”

  His brows furrowed with that look of empathy she knew so well. But instead of welcoming it, she resented it. Worse, she felt tears working their way to her eyes. She hated crying.

  She wanted to beat his chest and demand to know why he couldn’t love her. But that would be pathetic, and if she saw pity in his eyes, she knew she’d never recover. Nobody could fall in love with someone they pitied.

  “I’m useless here. The data flow . . . It’s like I’m afraid of heights. I just can’t jump into it. It’s too deep.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  The truth tumbled from her lips. “I’m afraid of getting swallowed up in it. Like what’s happening to you. You’re becoming less and less you.”

  “Really?”

  In that moment he was very much his old self. The heat of embarrassment flushed her cheeks. Admitting to fears wasn’t a habit of hers. The reality of her existence pressed in on her from all sides. She was free to be a goddess here, but a goddess of what?

  “I liked that bird you made,” Vaughan said, voice barely audible in a freshening breeze.

  “I didn’t make that. I figured you did it.” The simulated St. Vitus had all the plants and creatures she’d come to know over a lifetime on the island. “To cheer me up.”

  Vaughan shrugged. “Maybe Liz sent it to annoy you.”

  Belle doubted that. Liz could be a bitch, but she ignored Belle more often than she confronted her. “I didn’t make it.” She looked to the sky. “Maybe the simulation made it.”

  Vaughan frowned. “Maybe. I need to get back to work. My other selves have devised a novel way to track down Dr. Carlhagen’s broadcasts. All we need now is for him to do it again.”

  Vaughan disappeared in a sizzle of static.

  Belle closed her eyes and felt the data flow with her senses. It was everywhere. All she needed to do was dive into it and she could watch what Vaughan was doing. She had no doubt she could understand it. She was as smart as he was. Smarter, in many ways.

  A rushing sound—like a torrent of water falling over a cliff—grew and grew as she leaned her mind closer to the data flow. It made her feel puny and insignificant.

  She shied back from it, failing yet again.

  8

  The Blood Moves

  The Dreamless is cold, timeless, empty.

  No hate. No enthusiasm. No suspicion.

  Billions of new cells have grown, invisible to a human observer.

  Lazarus notices that Livy’s mass has increased. The protein allotment increases to support more growth. Schedule for Scion maturity on track for eight years and fifteen days.

  The AI cycles the Scion’s lungs for three inhalations. Nanites scurry across teeth, harvesting rogue bacteria to prevent decay.

  “Livy” is a tag in a metadata file attached to the specimen’s records.

  The blood moves. Thump.

  Thump.

  The Dreamless

  is.

  9

  My Double Lucky Number

  So this was what Dr. Carlhagen’s mind felt like. Awake, alert, but with muted emotions.

  Take fear, for instance. Jacey’s terror during the sub-orb’s final descent and landing screamed at her from behind a thick wall of gauze. Yes, it was there. She understood the intensity of her fear. But the drug didn’t let her heart hammer or her palms sweat.

  All thanks to a tiny pill. Andleprixen, which Meow Meow called prixie.

  They had debarked the sub-orb and stepped directly into another self-driving limousine waiting for them on the tarmac. Jacey had only enough time in open air to smell the hot exhaust of the sub-orbs and hear a distant roar of another one taking off.

  Rain pattered on the windows as the limo’s wheels hissed across smooth pavement toward the largest buildings Jacey had ever seen.

  “A storm is coming,” Meow Meow said, looking at her tablet. “Class one. That should help with outside cameras.”

  “Coming?” Jacey said. “It’s like night out.”

  Trees along the street leaned hard in the wind. Headlights charged toward them in the southbound lane, then swept past in a flash that lit up the inside of the car, whitening Dante’s face for an instant before shadows ate him up.

  The skyport was surrounded by cities, it seemed. Lights everywhere, and concentrations of gigantic buildings to the north, south, east, and west. Jacey had thought the hotels in Casino San Juan had been tall, but these . . . The closer they got, the bigger they appeared to be. “It’s like something out of a dream. Like a nightmare.”

  Lightning flashed against thousands upon thousands of glass windows on floor after floor of just a single building. All were lit up, each an office or an apartment or a hotel room.

  “All those lives . . .” she said, not knowing what she meant, but feeling the significance of it nonetheless. The isolation she and the Scions shared on St. Vitus was clear. The outside world was not only vast, as she’d seen on the sub-orbital flight. It was deep. Her own problems were a small drama. A speck.

  But for her that speck was a mountain of trouble. “I need to find an address for Dr. Carlhagen’s old holodesk.”

  “Yes, yes,” Dante said. He didn’t hide how tired he was of hearing her say that. “We’ll figure it out, but first we need to get away from the airport. We’ll switch cars a few times, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because not only is Captain Wilcox looking for you, the IPA is hunting all of us. And they have eyes everywhere. Literally.”

  He noticed Jacey’s blank look, that she was trying to imagine how a police agency would have eyes everywhere. “Cameras,” he said. “I know you’ve heard this lecture before. But listen. In this city, everyone is under surveillance. Cameras are everywhere. All of that video funnels to an AI whose sole task is identifying people and tracking their movements.”

  Jacey flicked the bottom of her veil with a finger. “But I have this.”

  “And it’s illegal to wear in public. But never mind that. The identification AIs don’t necessarily need to see your face to know who you are. They can tell someone’s identity by voice, gait, body posture, and behavior prediction. They track your daily habits and calculate who you are by where you’ve been and where you’re going. The veil . . . I say get rid of it. Concealing your identity will make them look at you closer.”

  “So you’re telling me I shouldn’t be wearing this? Because I’m happy to fling it out the window right now.”

  Meow Meow answered. “You’re damned if you do and double-damned if you don’t. For the next hour or so—until we can get you safely to a sur-blind place—”

  “Sur-blind?”

  “Surveillance-blind. No cameras.” Meow Meow snapped her fingers in Jacey’s face. “Keep up, please. Anyway, until we get you into a sur-blind place, you need to wear the veil. The AIs don’t know your posture that well, or your walking gait. I’m positive they won’t match you to Jackie B. based on your gait.”

  “Really?”

  “You don’t move like she did. You’re much too fluid. Like you’ve had years of dance training.”

  “I have.”

  “Jacqueline did not.”

  “So that’s good news. These AIs won’t be able to identify me.”

  “That will make them suspicious,” Dante said. “If they detect someone they don’t have gait identification for, they’ll watch extra-close. And they’ll be even more suspicious if they see a veil.”

  “Yes,” Meow Meow said with extreme patience. “But at
any given time there are thousands of people breaking the law and wearing them. Better to give the IPA thousands of suspects to screen than one dead-on identification.”

  Dante shrugged and left it up to Jacey to decide. For now, she’d keep the veil.

  The limo turned onto a ramp that led to a wide, raised road. Wind whistled by the windows as they merged with an endless flow of cars and buses. The low concrete barrier at the edge of the road blurred by and the wheels’ hiss rose in pitch. Jacey decided it best to not look out, as the self-driving limo thought nothing of trailing the vehicle ahead with so little room Jacey couldn’t see its rear bumper.

  “We’re going to keep to known camera shadows,” Meow Meow said. “When you’re as famous as I am—which you are, honey—you need to learn skills that the less savory among our population develop. Staying out of view of cameras is one. Staying sur-blind is actually kind of a fun game.”

  “And how do you know where these camera shadows are?”

  Meow Meow pulled her tablet from her bag. “You need a guide. Luckily, we’re in Chicago, baby. And where the light shines brightest, the shadows are darkest.”

  Dante snickered, elbowing Jacey. “I loved that one.”

  “That one what?” Jacey always felt like she was the subject of the conversation but understood it the least.

  “That ‘we’re in Chicago, baby’ bit was a line from Menominee Falls, one of Jackie’s neo-retro noir films. She played a Chicago private detective hired by a mob boss to find out who killed his favorite nephew. There was a lot of drinking, smoking, and shooting in it.” He frowned at her. “You really need to bone up on your Jackie B. knowledge if you’re going to pretend to be her.”

  It was Jacey’s turn to snicker. “Pretend to be her. I have no intention of pretending to be her.”

  “If the IPA catches up, you better as hell pretend to be her,” he said.

  Jacey looked at Dante to make sure he hadn’t popped a couple prixies. His eyes were as clear as ever and glimmered with amused seriousness. She checked Meow Meow, but the girl just lifted her eyebrows and nodded in agreement.

  “Why?” Jacey asked.

  Meow Meow slipped her little tablet back into her bag. “Because carbos—clones—are illegal in the North American Union and pretty much everywhere else. If you admit you’re an escaped carbo, they will execute you.”

  “You’re a non-person,” Dante said. “Legally speaking. No offense.”

  Non-person. The term hit Jacey like a kick in the stomach from Captain Wilcox’s boot. Non-person.

  The limo pulled off the raised road and made a few sharp turns before coming to a stop beneath the overpass.

  “Car switch,” Dante said.

  They piled out and ran, heads down against a slanting rain, veils flying up in the wind. The cloud cover was so thick it looked like midnight.

  The inside of the new limousine was the same, except the seats were beige instead of black.

  “I don’t like this non-person idea,” Jacey said to Dante as she shook water off her hands. “You know I have feelings and worries, right? You know I’m a person.”

  “The fact that you can talk and have memories and feelings does weigh in your favor. For me, anyway. But you’re not the typical carbo, thanks to Dr. Carlhagen. A run-of-the-mill carbo is a mental zombie. No personality, minimal vocabulary, no obvious emotion or even awareness of time passing. They make decent household servants, though. Having a crew of identical-looking carbo servers is seen as a status symbol in China and Russia. Especially if they’re hot like you.”

  “But you’re a clone,” she said. “Why don’t they execute you?”

  “Because I’m actually Silvio Silva and I can prove it. Even though what I did might be seen as immoral from a certain perspective, there is no law against it. For the simple fact that no lawmaker or court has contemplated the possibility of such an act before.”

  Meow Meow made a grumbling noise. “You should probably shut up while you’re ahead, Dante.”

  “It’s fun to be honest sometimes,” Dante said. He stopped and smiled at the irony his words. “Jacey, if you are caught by the authorities, you are Jacqueline Buchanan. Not a carbo. Tell them you’ve been to a rejuvie clinic or something.”

  “And if the other Scions are caught?” she asked.

  “I think you know the answer to that question, my dear.” He looked past Jacey at Meow Meow. “Did you get hold of your shadowy friend?”

  “Yes. He’ll be joining us at the Two Seasons Hotel. He said if we enter through the parking structure beneath the hotel, there is camera shadow on level six. I have the parking slot number. If we hug the wall, we can stay out of view until we get into the elevator vestibule. That camera is non-functional. From there we take the elevator to the lobby.”

  “And then?”

  “He didn’t say. He’ll meet us there. It’s going to cost us a gold and green.”

  Dante sucked air through widened nostrils. For someone who bragged about his riches, he sure hated to let go of his chips. “Do you trust this guy?”

  Meow Meow pressed a tiny hand to her flat chest. “Siggy has kept me safe from paparazzi on many visits to the city. He’s got guys inside the IPA.”

  Dante’s eyes lit up and he smiled. “Ah. I see.”

  “What?” Jacey asked, once again feeling like she was understanding only part of the conversation. “What do you see?”

  “This Siggy character is an agent with the IPA. He just happens to be corrupt.”

  Meow Meow grinned. “One man’s corruption . . .”

  “. . . is another man’s virtue,” Dante finished in a theatrically slow cadence.

  “Let me guess,” Jacey said. “That’s a bit from another Jackie B. film.”

  “Same movie, actually,” Dante said.

  An idea occurred to Jacey. It wasn’t something she wanted to do, but it sounded like she had no choice. “This hotel we’re going to—will it have one of those video monitors like the one from Vin’s mansion? With all the video programs on it?”

  “Yes, darling,” Meow Meow said. “The Two Seasons is a four-star hotel.”

  That meant exactly nothing to Jacey, but fine, that was good. “Once I contact Humphrey, I need to spend some time alone with one of those monitors. Can they play the movies four or five times faster than real-time?”

  “They can play it a hundred times faster,” Dante said. “But why would you want to do that?”

  Jacey leaned back into the leather seat and closed her eyes. “Because I’m going to memorize as much of what Jackie B. ever said as I can.”

  She felt them staring at her, but she didn’t open her eyes to acknowledge it. Instead, she smiled and sank into the soft cottony numbness of her mind.

  The sixth level of the underground parking structure echoed in spooky ways as Jacey skirted along a cold concrete wall to stay out of camera view. The stench of rotting garbage made her keep her lips clamped tight.

  Most of the parking spaces were empty. Just a few dark vehicles crouched across the cavernous space. Thick, round support columns stood in ranks, creating shadows in an already dim brown light.

  Meow Meow led the way, stepping lightly and dragging her shoulder against the wall as she followed it toward a blue painted steel door with a white 6 stenciled on it.

  She’d made a shushing motion before they’d gotten out of the limo. It made sense. Even if a camera wouldn’t see them, one could still pick up their voices. Dante said voice identification was very important to the surveillance AI.

  Just the thought of an AI like Madam LaFontaine keeping tabs on so many millions of people made Jacey shiver. Who needed all that information? What did they use it for? Who controlled the people who controlled the AIs?

  Dante had laughed at that last question. He’d mumbled something about “watching a watchman” or something. Jacey had elbowed him. “I’m glad my ignorance is such a constant source of amusement to you.”

  Meow Meow stopped at the
door and checked her veil. Jacey did the same, though she was sick of wearing it.

  The door led into a small room with three elevators. Meow Meow pressed the up arrow. Doors slid open. Once they’d gotten in, she retrieved her little tablet and tapped a message into it.

  It binged a few seconds later. “Siggy is waiting for us.”

  The elevator went up three levels before stopping. Dante yanked Jacey around. She found herself in an odd huddle with him and Meow Meow as the doors slid open. He’d faced her away from the door.

  Someone got on. No. It was two people.

  “Will you remember which level we parked on?” said a man.

  “I’ll remember,” said a woman, sounding peeved to be asked.

  The elevator continued up again. When it stopped, Dante held onto Jacey until the two others had gotten off.

  Something thumped behind her. “Sit.” It was a man’s voice, raspy.

  Dante shoved her back. Something struck the back of her knees and she collapsed into a chair. A squawk of surprise escaped her lips and the man behind her laughed quietly.

  “Feet up,” he ordered.

  She complied and metal footrests swung under her feet. Suddenly she was rolling backward.

  Each side of the chair was a large skinny wheel. She saw two men waiting at the elevator, each with a wheelchair. One went in and got Meow Meow. By the time the skinny girl was being wheeled out, the man driving her chair had spun her and was pushing her through an enormous lobby.

  Though the parking level had been spacious, the low ceilings had given it an oppressive feel. The lobby of the Two Seasons was the exact opposite. The ceiling seemed to be as tall as the entire building. It just went up and up and up. On every side was level after level of balconies.

  The marble floors and glass made the space reverberant and noisy. A hundred people milled about, all in suits and dresses. Much more formal than Vin’s party. They clung together in large groups, talking, talking, talking. Most were smiling. Many wore nametags.