by Andy Cox
Anecdotal reports of scanning-tunneling-microscopy conflict. Some samples have reportedly contained unrecognizable nanomachines. Some samples have contained only hallucinogens. Some samples have contained both. Anecdotal rumor that numerous artistic and scientific prodigies of recent years are the creation of metaprogrammers remain unsubstantiated.
Use of metaprogrammers is opposed by every organized government and religion on the planet. Standing death threats and spontaneous terrorist activity directed at anyone involved in the production, distribution, or promotion of metaprogrammers have led to a worldwide prohibition of all VLAI derived consciousness altering substances.
The pills are still widely available.
***
I read the FAQ again, shaking my head.
“I can’t believe you took this stuff.”
“I didn’t want Faith to die… I didn’t want to die. I couldn’t renounce God. The situation was impossible. Mostly, I didn’t want to die. That was most important. Does that sound bad? That I cared more about myself than my daughter?”
I glanced back, hoping Faith was asleep. She wasn’t. I shrugged at her helplessly. She made a growling noise.
“I love the kid, don’t get me wrong,” Helen said, “but to be honest, she can be a pain in the ass. We’ll have help in Oceania. We’ll indenture a servant to take care of her. A ten year contract goes for a few hundred bucks. I’ll go back to my painting.”
Oceania. Did I want to go to Oceania? I mainly wanted to leave Sylvia. The libertarian free-state was supposedly a decent place to live, if you had money, and weren’t bothered by things like indentured servitude.
“I’ve missed you,” Helen was saying, “I never knew it when I was in the compound, but after I took the programmer, I knew.”
Helen’s slate pinged. I retrieved it from the glove box, flinching at the sight of the blinking mail icon. A message from Sylvia, video. I shuddered. I contemplated doing a voice-to-text, so I could read the message rather than see her face, and then hit the play button to punish myself for being such a shit.
She’d been crying, her eyes red and swollen. Her hair was still messed up from our morning sex.
“You prick!”
I swallowed bile.
“You shit! You asshole! You’re blaming me for the pharmtek, aren’t you? You were miserable! You were sick and I told you to go the doctor and you leave me for that? You’re pathetic!
“That was Helen you left with, wasn’t it? I replayed the porch security cam. Christ, Evan, you didn’t even like her, let alone love her. You told me you argued all the time, and she was selfish in bed.”
Helen frowned at me, then glared at Sylvia on screen. I grimaced. Man.
“She didn’t know what she wanted! Why do you think anything will be any different. Oh, why am I talking to you at all?”
She sniffed. “Your daughter looks cute. If I’d known you’d wanted one… Never mind! I hate you!”
She looked into the camera, her expression empty.
“Come home. This isn’t the way to do anything. We’ll talk about it. Come home. Now.”
The message ended. I was shivering and wanted to die. I dug around in my pants pocket, dug out a few five dollar coins and the metaprogrammer. I gulped it down dry.
“You took the pill?” Helen said.
I nodded.
“You’ll feel better in about five minutes.” She licked her lips, and kissed me, her hands stroking the front of my jeans, tugging down the zipper. Just as the warmth started to rise, I caught a glimpse of Faith out of the corner of my eye in the rear-view mirror, her tongue fully extended.
She had a remarkably long tongue, for a child. I pushed Helen’s hand away. Not in front of the kid—
The Kia hit a bump, and the rear windshield pinged. I craned my neck to see the tiny hole whistling there, at the center of a glistening spiderweb. There was a matching hole in the front windshield, higher, and to the left.
Bullet holes. Someone shooting. A small popping sound over the hiss of the highway, like champagne being opened in the next hotel room.
“Oh shit.” Helen thumped the dash, extending the steering column. “Off-program! Emergency override!”
A blue sedan with darkened windows was gaining on us, a dozen car lengths back. There came a sound like a soda can being speared by a sharpened tire iron. Another one. Helen turned the wheel hard right, thudding me into her shoulder as Faith started screaming. The car fishtailed into the far right lane, decelerating.
“Your flock wants its money back!” I shouted.
“The gun! Under your seat!”
Helen hit the accelerator, throwing me back as a second bullet hole blossomed on the passenger side of the windshield where my head had been a second before. I rooted through the garbage. My hand closed on something metallic and sticky and I withdrew a polished slab of chrome with a crosscut latex handle slathered with what I guessed was pink yogurt. I’d fired a gun, once, in the woods behind my grandfather’s cabin – I’d lifted it from his dresser drawer without asking. I’d put my thumb in the exact wrong place. The bolt coming back had broken it instantly.
Traffic purred around us serenely, still on program, a grid of passenger cars and truck-trains, most with opaqued windows. People were napping or watching video inside. We were tooling through the Jersey free-zone, a ten mile strip of land too polluted to be of use to anyone, a ring around the port complex at Galt.
Helen dodged through the grid. The dash lit up, blinking red and yellow. The car’s brain was full of overrides – more BlackNet stuff, or she wouldn’t be able to drive at all on the pike. I fumbled for the gun’s safety, flicked it back and forth a few times fast. I then had no idea which position was which.
“They’ll need an account number and my password to get their money back. They’re trying to scare us,” Helen shouted.
“It’s working!” I shouted. “They may need you, but they don’t need me. Or Faith.”
Helen was making her own lane out of the gravel shoulder, passing car after car. A gray-haired woman in a tiny smart car gave us the finger. We thumped over a cast-off tire tread and fishtailed. I bit my tongue, tasting blood, as another bullet took out the window on Helen’s side of the car.
We all screamed.
My hand was tingling. I stared at the gun drizzling smoke from its short barrel. I’d shot the steering wheel, the bullet ripping through the airbag, triggering a secondary explosion. My heart was doing strange, painful things. I’d almost blown Helen’s brains out. Blood trickled from both her nostrils as she wrestled with the wheel. A howl of wind and traffic hiss filled the car, and that rhythmic throbbing you get when you open one window but not the other.
I cracked my window to equalize the pressure.
“Shoot at them, you idiot!”
“The assholes!” Faith wailed. “Assholes!”
I leaned back and checked her for damage, trying to avoid looking into her bulging eyes. The top left corner of her carseat was missing, sheared clean off.
“Stay in the seat,” I yelled. She ignored me, wriggling horribly.
Helen ground her teeth. “Shoot back! We’re six miles from the checkpoint!”
My first shot went wild. Was it possible I’d killed some innocent person ten cars back? I braced the gun in both hands, resting the stock on the baby seat – Faith had slipped the harness and made it to the floor and was burrowing through the trash, shrieking continuously.
The gun bucked in my hand with every pull of the trigger. The sedan’s windshield starred, and I shouted “Yes!” Another shot hit the windshield, and another.
I was clicking off rounds as fast as possible, screaming like a happy redneck when a tire burst, sending us into the guardrail. At our fantastically inappropriate speed, the rail tore like tissue paper, and the car flipped over into the drainage ditch. Time slowed down.
We were in free fall. I looked back.
Faith floated in midair in a constellation of fast food ga
rbage. Through the rear windshield, the horizon slowly rotated 360 degrees.
Crash balloons blossomed throughout the cabin with the stench of gunpowder.
My head hit something, hard, and I blacked out.
***
“YOU ARE BLEEDING TO DEATH. DO YOU WANT TO BLEED TO DEATH?”
The voice came from somewhere over my left shoulder. I twisted, sending daggers of pain through my ribcage, many things broken inside. Many. More blood than I thought I had in my body soaked my jeans and my flannel shirt, which was warm and stiff and reeked of copper. There was a shard of bloody plastic jammed into my left thigh. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it should. The crash balloons had deflated.
Beside me, Helen lay motionless. I pushed my fingers into her neck, and thought I felt a pulse.
“I don’t want to bleed to death.” I pulled the shard out of my thigh. The wound pulsed dark blood once, then stopped.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE?”
The voice wasn’t coming from over my shoulder. It was inside my head, quiet and infinitely gentle.
I smelled gasoline.
“I want to do the right thing,” I croaked. There came a rustling from behind, a soft moan. Faith wasn’t dead. Yet.
“DO WHAT IS RIGHT FOR YOURSELF, OR FOR OTHERS?”
I knew what it meant by others. The people around me now. “Both. Myself and others.”
“BOTH IS IMPOSSIBLE. COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT NECESSARY.”
“Do it.”
“COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT MAY NOT CORRELATE WITH HAPPINESS—”
“Do it!”
“EXECUTING.”
People were walking around outside the car. Shiny black shoes, and dark pant legs swished around us. The Kia was still in one piece, upside down, tipped up with its hood ornament crushed into the tarmac. Damn safe car.
“Fix me,” I subvocalized. “Make me strong. Fast. Make me fearless.” I closed my eyes.
“Make me a good person.” Somehow, in that instant, I knew exactly what being a good person was, as if I’d always known, somewhere, deep down inside. I knew what I was saying, I knew what I meant.
“EXECUTING,” the voice inside repeated.
I fumbled through the garbage and broken glass littering the car’s roof. There was no chance in the world I’d find the gun. I knew that.
I did anyway. I checked the magazine. It held three bullets, plus the one in the chamber.
There was a splashing sound. The people attached to the legs were pouring something over the car. Gasoline. So help me, I expected them to ask for Faith, to save her and kill me. But they didn’t.
Faith crawled towards me along the roof, blood streaking her face like Apache warpaint.
I held my finger to my lips. I had a few broken ribs, and a gash in my left thigh that had nicked my femoral artery. Which had stopped bleeding for no reason at all. Nanomachines?
Unseen hands pulled Hellen’s body through the broken side window.
“She’s alive,” a man’s voice, flat, affectless.
I took a deep breath. I felt different. Clearer, somehow. Was the metaprogrammer still active? “I need to save this girl. My daughter.”
“OPTIMIZE YOUR IDENTITY FOR THE GIRL’S SURVIVAL?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Torch the car,” someone outside said.
“EXECUTING,” the voice said.
***
I had a gun with four bullets.
I moved faster than I thought was possible.
I did the right thing.
***
There had been a time when a spectacular two car accident would have snarled traffic for twenty miles back. The curiosity factor, they called it on the traffic reports, the Lookie Lous. The traffic control program didn’t allow for such things. Only a few people noticed the wreckage in the ditch at the side of the road. The two burning cars – one filled with four dead bodies, each man with a single bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
Helen, Faith and I huddled together in a sticky blanket I’d found in the back seat, waiting for the EMTs. Helen had wrapped herself around Faith. I had my arms around them both.
After I’d shot out Helen’s airbag, she’d hit the steering wheel hard enough to crush her ribcage visibly. She’d vomited more blood than I imagined existed inside a human body. I had no idea why she was still alive. Nanomachines?
Helen demanded I find her slate, which oddly was still working. I pinged the EMTs. I contracted a medevac. Oceania had no extradition treaty with the Commonwealth. If they arrived before the Troopers, we’d be home free. They were seven minutes away on the map, a pulsing blue dot making a bee line for our crosshair.
Helen’s bloody forefinger moved slowly, deliberately, over the tablet.
A video window popped up. A Las Vegas marriage mill.
I’d proposed to Helen, once. A long time ago. She’d said she’d get back to me. She’d never spoken to me again. Just the one letter, about how I’d burn in hell.
Helen coughed. I used my shirt to clear the blood from the slate. Faith was keening softly in her arms, her face buried in her right armpit.
I explained our situation to the alarmed looking woman at the marriage mill. She nodded, recovering quickly. She had done this kind of thing twice before. Once with a couple climbing Everest, who’d been caught in an unlucky storm.
The ceremony took four minutes. We used the old words instead of improvising modern vows, as we were pressed for time. Till death do us part. The biometric scans, thumbprints and retinas, and witnessing took another two. I heard the EMT copter in the distance.
Helen looked into my eyes. “This was never going to work.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know about that.”
“I loved you,” she said.
“Everything is going to be OK,” I said, rather than lie.
She nodded. “You’ll be a better father than I was a mother, I’ll bet. You always were a buzzkill.”
I kissed her forehead. We embraced, the three of us, our little, hastily assembled family.
The marriage lasted for a minute and a half.
***
I’d used half of Helen’s cash, the Enclave’s money, to pay my way into Oceania with Faith. Helen’s people had called off the mass starvation. I returned half their money via a BlackNet anonymous transaction.
A million doesn’t buy much in Oceania. First and last month’s rent on a one room studio in one of the artists’ arcologies. Power, HVAC, data, and the voluntary security payment ate up most of it. I was going to skip the ‘voluntary’ payment, Oceania has very little crime, but it turns out that people who don’t make the voluntary payments suffer strange accidents. That’s Oceania for you in a nutshell: honest extortion. And weirdly, I liked it. It reminded me of the nineteenth century, but with computers and dentistry.
I rebooted the modeling field and loaded the sculpture. The memorial. I played the history file as a loop, watching the thing take form, shift and grow. Saw it erupt into chaos as Faith demolished the base.
It was finished, but it wasn’t static. Each form led logically, inevitably, to the next. It had to be animated, a loop, which I completed by finishing the destruction that Faith had started, and morphing that cloud of star speckled dust back into the starting state as an orrery of black and silver spheres.
People come to sculpture for permanence, understand. For something that stands against time. There was no paying market for this kind of thing. No bank would want this for the office lobby. Too distracting. Disturbing. Messy.
It was undoubtedly the best thing I’d ever made. But it was only for me.
Faith woke up screaming.
Second best. I powered down the field.
“I dreamed about Mommy,” she said. “She was dead and bloody. There were monsters. Monsters! Where were you? Where were you?”
“I was there.” I brushed the fine blonde hair out of her eyes. “I’m always there. There aren’t any monsters,” I told her. “Just
assholes.” Faith cried at that, and I tried to hold her. She didn’t want to be held, and bit my arm, hard enough to inscribe a little semicircle of marks, leaking blood in places. I backed off and waited, sitting cross-legged a few feet away on the bed.
She kicked and punched the futon for awhile, wailing like a banshee, and finally lay, sobbing and shuddering amidst the twisted sheets. These tantrums were coming farther and farther apart. I’d actually graphed them out, so I knew for sure.
I’d considered dosing Faith with metaprogrammers and telling her to forget her mother and be happy. Amazing, what we think to do to the people we love.
“I’m hungry,” she wailed, finally.
I arranged her clothes, and patted her hair down a little. Good enough. “Let’s go eat, then.” There was a cafe we both liked down the street, EM shielded. You couldn’t even get a phone call there. I loved the place.
Faith’s eyes looked very blue, rimmed with red still, but she’d stopped crying. She smiled her perfect teeth, and snorted.
“You’re a good monster,” Faith said. She’d probably be crying again in a little while. And happy again, sometime later.
I wiped her nose. “You’re a good little girl,” I said.
She shrugged. She knew that.
So we went out and ate.
***
Jay O’Connell lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife, two teenage children, cats, books, and computers. He’s been a construction worker, market researcher, fast-food slave, tech boom software executive, graphic designer, GLBTQ activist, and serial entrepreneur. You can find him on the web at http://www.jayoconnell.com, and read his fiction in recent issues of Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantastic Stories, and a smattering of worthy small press and web-based publications.
