Remains

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  Nemily read the rest of the note apprehensively. Clare wanted to hear from her, learn how she was doing, and hoped everything was as Nemily had dreamed it would be.

  “CAPs don’t dream, Clare,” she whispered.

  She closed her terminal down then and finished drying her hair. So Toler had left Clare again. Nemily thought she ought to be used to it by now, he had always disappeared for long periods of time, only to return unexpectedly with no explanations other than vague inferrences to important work. But two years was far longer than any of the other times. Perhaps he had left her for good. Somehow, though, knowing that Toler was gone from Clare, possibly gone from Lunase again, disturbed her. She was tempted to try to replay Mace once more, give her mood an extra jolt.

  She had expected Mace to make excuses and leave after his discovery of her modification. When he did not, she found herself mawkishly willing to share with him every detail of it. He seemed genuinely interested but she did not want to get her hopes up. She had always assumed there were people who did not find her augments repulsive. Most of her coworkers accepted them. But this was another level of intimacy, where otherwise untried tolerances often crumbled. After Mace had found out—after her cook’s tour of how her brain worked—she had paid attention to how he touched her, trying to compare it to the previous night. If anything, he had been more open and generous. It became impossible to remain detached, but his hands had not gone to the back of her neck more or less often than before, the way they might had he been one of those fetishistically excited.

  He had made love to her.

  Too soon to tell, she thought, drying herself. For the moment he seemed to be a normal man—well, a somewhat better than normal man, kinder and more sympathetic—who found her attractive and treated her as a normal woman.

  Normal...was it normal, she wondered, to carry one’s dead wife around in a ROM, hanging from the neck?

  She glanced at the time—twenty-three-fifty Not long from now she would have to go to work. Feeling relaxed, she sprawled across the clean sheets and closed her eyes.

  PolyCarbs campus occupied a couple of square kilometers at the base of the northern cap, upshaft, in segment one. As Nemily stepped out of the shunt, she saw a man in the pale blue worktogs of Aea Structural Authority Maintenance cleaning a poster off one of the platform walls. From the tatters that remained, she recognized it as a political tag from the Post InFlux Cooperative. Propaganda. She was amazed that anyone had managed to post it here.

  She passed beneath banners bearing the bright azure, silver, and scarlet PolyCarb IntraSolar logo; they shifted slightly and the light rippled as if reflected off a pool of water. She queued up with several others at the security booth. One by one, people moved through the arch.

  The man just ahead of her stepped under the arch. The alarm claxon went off. Nemily jerked back, bumping the person behind her. Thin bars snapped across both openings of the arch, trapping the man within. A pair of security guards hurried forward. One of them touched something on the arch and the grating bleat ended. The bars on the inside slid away and they gestured the man to come with them.

  Nemily’s pulse raced. She had never heard this alarm go off. In Lunase it was a common enough sound. Often some Lunessa would be singled out as an example, an alarm sounding and security grabbing him or her for no reason. Nemily had gotten used to not hearing them.

  A plaque set in the right-hand leg of the arch caught her attention. “This security device is licensed and inspected by Structural Authority under provision 119 of the Internal Caretaker Mandate of C.E. 2062. Any unregulated use, tampering, or damage constitutes an actionable offense under the Public Safety Protocols of C.E. 2059.”

  The man was released. Nemily saw him striding unaccompanied, shoulders set, toward the main entrance. The bars on her side of the arch slid back and she passed through, half expecting the alarm to go off again. The security guards gave her distracted smiles and waved her through.

  She took stairs to her workstation on the third floor. John and Tara stood by the samovar opposite their supervisor’s office. Nemily went directly to her desk and put her augment case in the top drawer. The message light glowed on her monitor. She touched it and the screen brightened.

  “Your presence is requested in Human Resources at your earliest convenience.”

  Below that was appended a task list.

  “Where did you disappear after Piers’ party?” Tara asked as Nemily reached the samovar. “We went to Raifa’s but I didn’t see you.”

  “The alarm went off on the platform this morning,” Nemily said. She set a cup under the spigot and tapped in the code for hot chocolate.

  “There’ve been a few of those,” John said. “They upgraded the scans for profiles and frontals.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “According to Emilio,” Tara said, rolling her eyes in exaggerated disgust; Emilio worked one level up and kept the entire block current with gossip. “According to him, it’s because of the PIE”

  “What?” The samovar gurgled and liquid spilled into Nemily’s cup.

  John snorted. “That’s what I admire about you, Nem. You’re so unaffected by the world. You didn’t hear the new Post InFlux Manifesto?”

  “Oh. Them.”

  “Apparently,” Tara said, “they’ve increased the percentage by threatening action against corporate spaces. When I got here this morning the shunt platform was covered with PIF posts.”

  “They were cleaning them off when I got here. And this is supposed to accomplish what?” Nemily sipped her chocolate.

  Tara shrugged. “They think like Gaians.”

  “Their complaint isn’t all that invalid,” John said. “They say the new domicile construction is in violation of both Structural Authority protocols and immigrant rights.”

  “Really,” Tara drawled.

  “For one thing,” John continued, “there aren’t any decompression capsules in any of the units.”

  “There aren’t any in my apartment either,” Tara said. “So?”

  “There should be.”

  “Anyway,” Tara said, “security is being a bigger nuisance than usual. They searched my pack yesterday.”

  “Reactionaries,” John pronounced and headed for his workstation.

  Tara shook her head and tapped the samovar for another cup of coffee. “By the way, there’s a Last Day party on two for—oh, what’s his name? The one from Elfor in code—”

  “Torem?” Nemily asked.

  “Him. Plans are it continues at Raifa’s all night.”

  “I’ll see.”

  “You have to tell me where you went after Piers’, but later. Tenure to secure.” She took her cup and went to her own desk.

  Nemily returned to her desk and sat down before her screen. She touched icons to organize her schedule for the day. The desktop blossomed into touch-sensitive screens and she began moving data around in preparation for interface.

  Melissa came in. Small and intensely pale, she always seemed much younger than she was until she began to speak. Her voice came out low and evenly modulated and elicited confidence in her people. She stopped at the samovar, then spoke to Tara, then came to Nemily.

  “Morning, Nem. Piers has a meeting at fourteen, he’ll need a collation from the status files on the Diomedes works, an overview—stats, current condition, midievel reports.”

  “Working on it already.”

  “Good. Did you see the message about Human Resource?”

  “Yes, I’ll—”

  “When you get this Diomedes ready, go. You want to see a man named Koeln. I’ll remind you.”

  “All right....”

  Melissa patted Nemily’s arm. “No problems, just routine updates. Anything else you need? I’ll be unavailable for the next few hours.”

  “Urn... no, I have everything.”

  “Good.”

  Melissa entered her own office space, separated from the main room by a transparent partition which now
opaqued.

  Nemily’s console signaled that her prep work was complete and ready for her. She reached under the right-hand side of the desk and drew out a long, thin cable, then opened the drawer and took out her augment case. She connected the cable to her collator and extracted the synthesist from her neck. She inserted the collator and pressed the interface icon on the desk. Numbers shifted on one of the displays; she felt them, dim echoes in the back of her awareness. A blue light winked on and she touched the icon to boot—

  —and stepped into the aisle of polished mahogany card files. A pleasant breeze passed through, scented with alfalfa and decay, tugging at the drawstring on the sunhat she wore hanging from her silk-collared neck. Nemily glanced up at the pristine blue sky and saw the sliver of a crescent moon, pale as a cloud.

  The labels on the drawers glowed softly. As she moved from one to the next, per the list on the sheet of heavy vellum in her hand, they changed from pale yellow to red. She pulled open each drawer in turn and took from each a single folder.

  At the end of the aisle, she emerged onto ankle-high grass. At the top of a gentle rise, a long table stretched beneath the shade of a pair of black-and-white striped umbrellas. She spread the folders out and began sorting through their contents, moving documents to a new folder she found already open on the table.

  Halfway through, she hesitated, listening carefully. All she heard was the rustling of wind through grass and leaves, a slight flutter of fabric along the edges of the umbrellas. Nemily turned slowly and surveyed the distant, hazy horizon-line, then the rows of file cabinets that stretched from one horizon to the opposite. From where she stood she could see clearly down six rows. Empty.

  As she turned back to the folders, something caught her attention in the sky, but when she looked directly she could not see anything. In moments the feeling of being watched evaporated.

  She finished extracting information from the folders and set the stack aside. She spent a few minutes sorting the sheets in the new folder—chronologically, by subject, and by department, each sorting creating a new sheaf of papers, which presented itself on top depending on which tab along the folder’s edge was used to open it—then sealed it with Piers Hawthorne’s sigil and moved it to the far end of the table. Hawthorne’s department dealt with site loss, claims for damage due to accident or, occasionally, sabotage and disaster. Each needed to be assessed and validated, costs estimated, and recommendations made. Usually, only other PolyCarb divisions were involved. Nemily had seen the flurry of bitter messages and countercharges that followed a denial, but since she had been here she had never seen one of his decisions successfully contested. Since reputations and careers depended on many of these decisions, Nemily felt tenuously proud to work for Hawthorne.

  She replaced the source files in their drawers. When she returned to the table, the new folder was gone, exchanged for an elegantly written note.

  “Please forward the following information to—”

  Nemily carried the note back down the aisles. This was a simple pull-and-send request, though time-consuming because the files were scattered. It could more easily have been done by an electronic agent, but egents, as they were called, were not nearly as secure as a cyberlink. She wrote a checkmark alongside each item as she found it, then placed the documents along with the note on the table where the first folder had been. In a moment it was all gone.

  The moon had become a clock face. She was ahead of schedule.

  She pulled files and assembled data for the rest of her morning shift. Tasks completed, she returned to the table to sit down in the campaign chair that now waited beneath a broad umbrella. She had considered changing the quasi-Edwardian motif to something more efficiency-inspiring, but the surround was too relaxing for her to give it up. She laid a hand against her throat and found her collar open.

  She sat up anxiously She did not remember opening it. She surveyed the diorama again. Something on the horizon drew her attention and now, taking the time to examine it carefully, she could make out a faint puckering in the sky, like the stress lines in a sheet of heated plastic. As she watched, the damage faded, the blue resuming its smooth, pristine surface.

  Her brooch lay on the table beside her. She snatched it up and pressed it between both hands—

  —and extracted the jack. She noticed vaguely that her pulse was elevated. Her hands trembled slightly as she pulled the cable from her collator and let it snake back into its receptacle. With exaggerated care, she took out her case and exchanged the collator for her synthesist. When she reinserted the augment, color snapped back into normal register, but she also felt the full intensity of her unease. She was tempted to take the synthesist back out and wait while her internal system calmed her down, but that always left her feeling the rest of the day like she had missed something important. Instead, she sat back and waited for the wave of distress to wash away.

  Across the room, Tara and John seemed busy with their own work, eyes fixed on their monitors, hands moving occasionally over icons, neither of them paying any attention to her. Nemily brushed her fingers over her mouth, but she had long ago learned how to keep herself from drooling while interfaced. Some cyberlinks never acquired that skill and spent the entire time uploaded sprawled like a rag doll, mouth hanging open.

  She drew a deep breath. The tremors stopped. She surveyed her desk, then initiated a full diagnostic, even though she expected to find nothing. The flaw in the diorama looked familiar, though she had not seen anything like it since leaving Lunase.

  It was a large system and took nearly two minutes for a full self examination. As she thought, it showed clear.

  “Nem.”

  Melissa leaned out the door to her office.

  “Yes?”

  “Time.”

  Nemily checked her clock: thirteen-forty She locked her desk down and stepped into Melissa’s office. “I finished. Piers’ data is in his hopper, the minders for the shareholder conference are out, and the analysis of—”

  “I saw,” Melissa said. She smiled shortly.

  “Urn... has a new program been installed recently? An oversight routine or something?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It just—a glitch I noticed, I thought perhaps it might be something new.”

  Melissa shook her head. “Not that I’m aware. I can check.”

  “I just ran a diagnostic and everything shows fine. I can do a more thorough check later. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “Good. You’d better go.”

  Nemily backed out of Melissa’s space, feeling better having reported the glitch. She waved at John and Tara as she headed for the door. Tara smiled, but John did not seem to notice.

  Nemily rode the lift up two levels to the company mall. She stepped between two of a long line of thick columns that reached up to a balcony, which held another line of similar columns offering symbolic support to an arched skylight. Ivory-hued light fell to the imitation marble floor. The mall’s design, she recalled from an orientation tour, was based on an ancient structure called Trajan’s Forum, which had once existed in a place called Rome. The mall was a replica of the Basilica Ulpia, one section of the original building, which existed now only as a data template.

  Human Resource occupied all of the antispinward balcony Desks, widely separated, were scattered across the floor, some of them invisible behind privacy screens that shone dully like graphite in strong light. Nemily slid her ID into the reader at the top of the stairs and the screen indicated the desk to which she should report. She found it near the wall farthest from the edge. A man sat there, a carafe and two cups to one side of the flatscreen raised on the near corner of the desktop. He stood when he saw her.

  “Ms. Dollard?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Linder Koeln. Please.” He gestured to the guest chair and sat back down. “Coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Anything? Juice? Water?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

/>   He nodded, a thin smile dimpling his plain face. He was a compact man whose head seemed slightly large for his body. His hands were wide and angular, strong looking. He poured himself a cup.

  “You’ve been with us for nineteen months now?”

  “Almost twenty.”

  “Mmm, and you’ve found the work satisfactory?”

  “Entirely.”

  He glanced at his screen. “Three merit increases in stipend, full pathic and an educational allowance. How long have you been in Mr. Hawthorne’s department?”

  “I transferred to audit ten months ago and moved to my current position in adjusters five months after that.”

  “And before?”

  “I started with PolyCarb in organics, on a comatulid line, doing oversight on mutation. From there I went to inspection of exotic metals, monitoring production of super stable alloys—”

  “And ended up manager of quality control there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Impressive. Had you had any prior experience when you were brought into audit?”

  “No.”

  “Were you approached by Mr. Hawthorne himself?”

  “Directly? No, Melissa Car—”

  “Melissa Cartol, his immediate assistant?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what are your exact duties?”

  “I’m a collator. I assemble requested data, trace peripheral material, and develop—”

  “You assemble Mr. Hawthorne’s reports.”

  “Urn—I wouldn’t—”

  “It’s what you do, even if the profile doesn’t so indicate.” He smiled. “This is confidential.”

  Nemily hesitated. Linder Koeln, though very good at masking it, seemed to be threatening her. He reminded her of the periodic morale interviews she underwent most of her life on the moon. For an instant she felt enclosed, part again of the warrens of Lunase. She glanced left and right reflexively, expecting to find cubicle walls instead of open space. The expanse of the balcony reassured her.

  “Oh,” Koeln said, leaning toward his screen, “forgive me. I can be thoughtless sometimes.” He touched something and the reassuring space vanished, replaced by graphite-colored wall. “No one eavesdrops anyway, but this does provide a sense of privacy. Better?”