Remains

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  Coif had told her how to set the alarm. Doubting now, she wondered what else it might trigger.

  Never mind what you leave behind, just get out, now....

  Nemily flinched at the clarity of the thought—almost audible, it seemed, with the kind of visceral reality dreams possessed—and pressed the button. She stepped into the corridor outside and let the door slide shut. Her hand hovered over the mici, unconsciously moving to set the alarm, responsibly, like a conscientious guest, until she made her fingers close and pulled away. Self-conscious paranoia made her aware of all the sounds around her, the taste of the air, and her own fallibility.

  Now....

  Coif’s dom was at the end of a short alcove off a main circuit. She walked out as if going somewhere, though she had nowhere in mind other than away. The circuit ran unobstructed in both directions, disappearing in the upward curve of the ring, the walls broken by alcoves. A section of flooring was torn up to her right, revealing the old tram railing. She saw no people, then remembered the time and the fact most of the people living here would be on-shift somewhere, and immediately realized that she was confusing Lunase with Aea and had thought of this space as worker area. Workers did not live segregated on Aea, at least not as a class.

  What do you call segment four? Could you live in segment two?

  She stumbled at the voice. Her heart rate increased. How deep the overlay had gone now became a matter of importance. She needed to run that diagnostic. The residuals ought to have faded by now to random images. The thoughts might have been her own—in fact, the observation was nothing new—but for the sour edge to them, the bitterness and spent rage. Her own opinions and beliefs, channeled through this persona, would come back twisted and darkened, recognizably her own, but stolen and despoiled. She caught her stride in the next step and concentrated on escape, ignoring the way the walls seemed for a moment to be stone.

  She walked on, uncertain of her location, but confident that eventually she would find a lift or another corridor intersecting this one. A group of men burst from an alcove, startling her, and hurried in the opposite direction, showing no sign that they had even seen her. She noticed more people now, withdrawn into shadow, squatting in small huddles or sitting alone, some staring at nothing, others studying a handheld reader. Her nerves danced as she darted looks at faces, expecting to find familiarity and unwelcome recognition. Instead, she saw only a vague suggestion of commonality and the dull reserve of mistrust not formed sufficiently for open complaint.

  She came to one of the big elevators. The spoke at arc ninety.

  Which way?

  Get lost....

  The voice irritated her, frightened her a little, but right now it made sense. When the doors opened, she stepped into the car, joining the half dozen others already aboard, and pressed the button for ring three. No one spoke to her or, as far as she could tell, even looked at her. The doors opened again and she exited alone.

  The rich odor of humus and chlorophyll and pulp enveloped her. It reminded her of the comatulid lines she had worked during her first months with PolyCarb, densely organic and curiously relaxing. A narrow corridor ran straight ahead between transparent walls through which Nemily saw tier upon tier of hydroponics platforms filled with green. Ring three, she remembered then, contained almost nothing but farms. The real farms, that fed Aea and produced the excess for export. Only one of the original tori farming rings had been changed to something else, and that was the endcap ring upshaft that bounded segment one. The Interior farms were mostly experimental and produced a significant fraction of Aea’s total output, but far from enough to feed the resident population.

  Nemily hurried along, hoping she looked as if she belonged here, unsure what she would say if anyone asked her where she was going. She glanced back. No one had followed from the lift.

  The transparency ran unbroken for nearly a hundred meters and ended at a wall with a door across the corridor. Anxiously, she pressed the access button. She exhaled heavily when the door opened.

  The chamber beyond contained banks of equipment. Cable and conduit flowed across the ceiling. Nemily recognized several components from the comatulid lines—monitors, sample analyzers, atmospheric regulators, nutrient processors—and many more she knew nothing about. She hesitated only a moment before crossing the chamber to the opposite door and stabbing the button. Again, the door opened and she walked through.

  She stopped. The ragged tops of plants stretched to the close horizon, shifting gently in an artificial breeze, beneath banks of bright lights. She did not recognize the crop, but it seemed familiar. She pushed her way in among the stalks. They brushed against her face lightly and their aroma came sharp. Her feet sank a few centimeters in the earth and she knew this had to be an experimental plot and that her presence here might distort the results, damage the effort. But if that were the case, why no security code on the entrance? Typical Aean arrogance, she decided. Why would anyone who did not belong here enter in the first place? Good manners in lieu of locked doors. Knowing she should not be here ought to be enough to make her leave. In that case it made a good place to hide for a short while.

  When she could no longer see the door through which she had entered, she sat down and pulled out her case. She wanted to go to her dom and use her terminal for a full external diagnostic, but for the time being this would have to do.

  She pried open the cover on her collator to reveal three tiny buttons and a jack. From beneath the lining of her case she took a cable, then opened the back of her mathematics augment and linked it to the collator. The combination allowed a deeper probe than the collator alone. The math augment read the coding in her system faster, as machine code, and passed it to the collator in a decipherable form. She rarely used it because of the ease of jacking through a full terminal and the fact that, powerful as the combination of the two was, this method still had limits. She exchanged her synthesist for the collator and closed her eyes, initiating the probe. She disliked going through these—the external diagnostic made them unnecessary—but it was the only way to find out if something had been buried so far down in her implants that a standard collation would not discover it. The last time she had done one had been a year before leaving Lunase.

  Her internal sensorem built an image for her...

  Walls formed, odors and textures filling in quickly. The differences were small, almost unnoticeable, but nagging, like a paper cut. Reddish sand gathered at the angles of the passage. Nemily felt as if she had just come inside out of a harsh wind, even though the air had moved barely enough to shift the stalks of the plants. The details completed themselves and she started along the coil.

  Near the bottom, wan amber light filtered up through dust-laden air. Sand piled deeper along the last coil, spilled across the floor, and shifted slightly as if stirred by a breeze. She came round the last turn to find the door standing open, the light coming from within the room.

  The shelves had been torn from the walls and all the packages ripped open. Contents slewed across the floor, jumbling together in a morass of facet bits and sludge. Sand and light poured through a jagged gap in the opposite wall. Nemily stepped over the debris to the crack and peered out across a landscape that could only be Mars.

  The ground sloped uphill gradually, the horizon no more than a line to mark the separation of land and sky. Nemily eased through the opening and set her foot into the yielding soil. Off to the left she saw a shape on the crest of the rise against a background of anemic cloud.

  She looked back into the room and ordered it to sort itself. The mess began to shift to the urging of faint puffs of light and Nemily started up the slope toward the form that waited.

  Within ten paces she knew it was a person. Ten more and she saw that it sat crosslegged, leaning slightly forward with wrists on knees, hands dangling, head cocked as if contemplating a distant object or an intimate thought. Air pushed at her, but the silence persisted, reminding her that this was all inside. That provided no com
fort now. Her buffers, doors, walls, labyrinths, pits and mirrors had failed and something had managed to work its way here. Not the ghost, no. Overlays normally did not possess the complexity to get this deep. None she had ever encountered. But she did not remember this one, so she could not know what else might have been done during her time with the client. The collator kept her fear at bay; otherwise she might be incapacitated by terror. Instead, she saw the figure on the hill as a problem to be solved.

  The person did not look up when Nemily stopped alongside. The compact body wore an environ suit, dark, oil-sheened fabric and a breather mask. Yellow-orange hair shifted in tangles around the straps. Nemily walked all the way around the intruder, but provoked no response. She crouched directly before the reflecting eyepieces and waited for a sign of recognition.

  She grabbed the edges of the mask and ripped it up and off.

  The woman could only be dead. Lifeless black eyes, mouth slack and partly open, all tension gone from the jaw. Nemily did not recognize her, even though this whole scene seemed familiar. Perhaps it came from the overlay, a leftover like the dreams. But how did it get here? Was it a trojan or the shell of one? She looked back toward the damaged wall.

  The building that housed her sensora rose up from the red sand. She had never seen it from the outside before. She had never expected it to have a shape, really. But it resembled Mace’s dom. Higher, but the same basic structure. Perhaps the system assembled it from the most relevant iconography within her net. The last time she had come here, the place resembled the mazes of Lunase and she had not gone “outside.”

  She followed the corpse’s gaze. In the middle distance stretched a long, straight trench in the otherwise homogeneous aresian landscape.

  She crossed the intervening distance through the soundless shift of thin air and stood on the edge of the hole. Sand partially filled the bottom, drifting up the sides, incompletely hiding the bodies. Arms and legs extruded at macabre angles. Along the rim at even intervals pylons jutted up, shards of material limply clinging to them. Nemily crouched at the nearest and tried to lift the fabric, but it dissolved and drifted away at a touch, electrons flying off in a swift chain reaction that undid the covalent bonding in the material.

  She retreated to the sentinel corpse and sat down beside it. The fluttering hair drew her attention. The way it shifted, she realized, repeated itself every few seconds. Nemily pushed it up from the neck, revealing an empty augment socket. She felt around in the sand in the unlikely event that the button had fallen out. Finding nothing, she scooted around to peer more closely into the socket. It seemed too small for a normal implant, but she had no idea how death might effect the muscles around a CAP socket. She ran a finger around its rim to see if it stretched—

  —and it closed around the tip. Nemily yanked back reflexively and nearly toppled the corpse onto her. She grabbed its shoulder with her free hand to support it and scooted around onto her knees for balance.

  The corpse’s arms flew out from the sides and it tried to pull away from Nemily’s attached finger. The body convulsed, shoved itself back-

  ward, then swung its legs out to the left, twisting onto Nemily’s lap. The face grinned up at her.

  “One piece still missing,” it said inside Nemily’s skull. “Who put me here?”

  The face began to desiccate, the skin drying rapidly, cracking, revealing bone coated with a faint tinge of blood. The black eyes became empty sockets and the clothes sagged. For all its melodrama, Nemily admitted that it was effective.

  The augment socket reopened and let her finger go.

  Nemily scrambled back and watched every trace of the corpse dissolve to nothing. In the middle distance the trench sealed itself, puckering up like a wound healing. She got to her feet and ran back to the tower. The breached wall was beginning to repair itself as she squeezed through. Within seconds the wall was smooth, without a sign of the break.

  The floor had been cleaned up, the opened boxes all repacked and stored on their shelves.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the overhead lights. She sat up. She had knocked several stalks over and her case lay tangled among them a meter away. With exaggerated care she retrieved it and slowly switched collator for synthesist, then disconnected the collator from the math augment.

  The thrill of recent fear rippled through her, chilling her, tightening her muscles, followed quickly by a sudden rage. She did not move and tried to concentrate on a point in midair, but the serpentine quality of her reactions pulled her away from possible calm. Her hand trembled. Her carefully constructed sense of self-determination was in shambles, but she at least understood now. Glim Toler had used her as a mule and now the delivery had been made. Whatever overlay she had experienced last night, its purpose was recovery and verification. Her sensorem had been ransacked for whatever Toler had hidden there. She had thought for a long time that the discs hidden in her luggage, discovered at InFlux, removed by Mace unreported, had been the contraband data Toler wanted smuggled in. But they had been something else—an announcement to someone that she had arrived, decoys, she was uncertain—and she had been the package. Somehow she had missed her contact upon entering Aea. A mistake which Toler had now come to correct.

  She was partly amazed at her logic. For three years she had been working all this out, in the cracks of her mind where it could be contemplated safely, hidden from daily consciousness. It happened sometimes to CAPs: a wetware analog to the unconscious, especially in the presence of overlays and the coincidental architectures they created, supposedly temporary structures that nevertheless persisted under certain conditions; good places to hide things, especially one’s own secrets. If collation missed them, the absence of dreaming allowed them to exist, segregated, until they completed themselves and dissolved, like code run to a conclusion. Occasionally, they reintegrated whole, as now, and it was like finding a forgotten year or a friend or another life.

  So whose overlay did I run last night? she wondered.

  In the distance the door opened. Nemily tucked her case away and started crawling through the stalks.

  After several meters she became aware of a low hum somewhere behind her. She paused and listened and decided it was only agro equipment, maybe a seeder or possibly a reaper. She crawled on until the sound grew louder. As she listened now, the source of the noise seemed to shift from left to right and back again. Slowly, she stood.

  A small shape crossed the field about a meter above the tips of the stalks, moving at a brisk speed, perhaps fifty meters away. Nemily dropped back to the ground, her pulse quicker now, and began scrambling in the opposite direction as fast as she could without knocking over plants. Several people had seen her get off the lift, but none of them had seemed to pay her much attention. Still, she no longer expected to be followed and her skills at recognizing a shadow had atrophied on Aea. Being innocuous was necessary to the task. Even so, there were other ways to trace her, and Reese of all people seemed now to be involved with the people who knew of her hidden vacuum—

  The sound grew closer and no longer seemed to be moving from side to side. She did not want to stop to look, did not want to risk being spotted. She had no idea how big this section was, or if there would be an exit when she reached the far wall.

  The hum roared directly above her and she felt the wind from the rotors in the searcher’s belly across her back and hair. She dropped flat and waited and it came back and stopped. She rolled over and looked up at the disc, maybe fifty centimeters in diameter, a central hole that funneled the lifting force of blown air, surrounded by a rim set with optical jewels.

  Nemily snatched her augment case from her pouch, stood, and shoved it into the fan cowl. The blades jerked it from her hand with a hideous grinding and spit it back out immediately The searcher slewed off the side, its motor laboring, and began slicing through stalks.

  Nemily retrieved her case. One end was scarred and bent, the smooth surface torn. She tucked it away and broke into a run toward
the nearest wall. She imagined she heard shouts, but it was hard to tell over the angry buzzing of the damaged searcher. She did not look back. She collided with the wall, lungs heaving from fear, and looked right, then left, and found the exit. She sprinted for it, stabbed at the control panel, and the heavy door slid aside.

  A group of people stood in a small gallery on the other side. They looked like a tour, one man standing before the rest, an arm raised in mid-gesture. They all froze in place as she hurried through, faces locked in startled expressions.

  “Sorry,” she said as she reached the far side. “Go on. It’s all right.”

  She plunged through the next door into a corridor and ran, dimly aware that on the other side of her stretched, behind transparency, more hydroponics. A few people worked amid all the green and watched her passage curiously, but none moved to stop her or report her that she could tell. They were all good Aeans and minded their own business.

  She came to a small elevator and waited anxiously for it to open. When it did, more people emerged, and she weathered the flood stoically Finally, she fell into the box, alone, and the doors closed. She stabbed a button without looking and pressed back against the wall and worked on controlling her breathing.

  The elevator stopped and the doors opened. She stepped out into the Heavy.

  She drifted through the throngs crowding the Heavy, trying to imitate the look of intense ambiguity, ambivalent concentration and casual urgency around her. It seemed they had nowhere to go and a powerful need to arrive. Another ghost would help. The one aspect of ghosting that seemed a benefit even in the midst of the less salutary uses of the tech had been the negation of self. Worries, concerns—they disappeared with the adoption of certain aspects of a persona unaffected by her own problems, giving her time and room to breathe. Not a deep ghost, just a light overlay that would give the patina of difference, enough to obscure her own self, but she did not know where in the Heavy to acquire one discreetly Reese’s influence suffused the Heavy like metastasized cancer. Even if he was sincere about legitimizing his interests, those cells would not simply evaporate, but would reach for autonomy. They would know. The afterimages from the ghost had all disintegrated, eaten away by her own defenses and any self-destruct commands imbedded within the overlay itself. She could not pretend that the dreams and the diorama on the hill had been errors from a too-complex overlay. At best, with all the optimism in the world, she might question that it had been intended for her, but under inspection even that faint hope dissolved. It had been left inside her sensorem, triggered by her “touch,” and given directly to her in terms she recognized. Reese had delivered her to people who knew her and had used her.