Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014

by Penny Publications

  It took them most of a prickly afternoon to rewrite the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence; they were being as cooperative as cats. Sturm and Silk took the revolution too seriously, in Remeny's opinion, as if it might happen next Wednesday. Silk argued for making as few changes as possible to their version; Sturm said their demands should be clear.

  "Unalienable?" said Sturm.

  "There's no such word." "There was back then."

  "Well, this is now."

  Botão seemed nervous about advocating the overthrow of anything. She was probably worried about being deported. "I like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Botão was standing so close to Sturm that their avatars were prectically merging.

  "We should keep that part. Someday I'm going to own my own domain, move in, and never get real again."

  "What's in your domain?" Sturm's blippage went all flirty.

  "You mean who?" She pushed away from him and poked a finger into his chest.

  "Maybe you wish it was you?" She smirked. "Not yet, Mystery Boy. Earn it."

  "Focus please," said Silk.

  ... later.

  "No, governments are supposed to serve us, not the other way around."

  Silk had created a rectangular glass conference table with himself at the head.

  The draft of the declaration glowed on its surface. "We can't change 'consent of the governed.' "

  "What is consent, anyway?"

  "Like permission, only more legal."

  "I never gave no consent for some bullshit EOS to ruin my life."

  ... much later.

  "So that means we have the right to overthrow the EOS?" Botão sounded doubtful.

  Toybox was lighting his fingertips on fire. "Overthrow the oldschool and be done with all the bullshit." The longer they talked, the higher the numbers on his boredom blip climbed. It was like watching a cartoon fuse burn.

  "I don't see how they give us a 'A' for overthrowing them," said Remeny.

  "If we prove they're unjust...."

  "But that's why we have to keep 'alter and abolish.' " Silk interrupted Sturm for the hundredth time. "Means the same as overthrow, only Jefferson wrote it. So we hide behind his language."

  ... much, much later.

  Sturm had changed the conference table from retangular to round. "If we get rid of the old government, then we need a new one," he said.

  "I'm not making up a whole new government," said Botão. "My job starts in half an hour."

  "So then no government," Sturm said. "Everyone for themselves. Law of the jungle."

  Before she could stop it, a (.2) shock blip flashed above Remeny's avatar. This wasn't like him.

  Eventually, after arguments and much blippage, they persuaded Silk to yield the power of the keyboard to Remeny, since she was willing to take other people's suggestions. While Silk brooded, they agreed on a draft of the crucial second paragraph.

  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all realities, hard and soft, old and new, are equal, and so are we the people who live in them, whichever reality we chose. All people, no matter whether they live in bodies or avatars, are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To guarantee our rights governments are supposed to serve we the people and not the other way around. They derive their powers from the consent of the governed. If a government goes off, it is the right of we the people to alter or to abolish it, and to make up some new government that will do the right thing."

  "Okay." Remeny checked the time on her overlord; she too would have to get real soon. "So now what?"

  "List everything the government is doing wrong." Silk broke his grim silence.

  Toybox groaned. "Not today."

  "No," said Remeny. "Save that for next time. Anything else?"

  "We need to think about making something happen in hardtime," said Sturm.

  "Take the revolution to the streets."

  "Then you're talking homework," said Botão. "I've got to be at work in ten minutes."

  "What if we speed this up to double time?" said Silk.

  Botão's embarassment shot immediately to (.4). "Umm... I'm not allowed."

  "Not allowed?" said Toybox. "Everybody's supposed to get some double time. They just don't let you have enough."

  "It's my mother." Now the blip was (.6). "She..."

  "Makes no difference." Sturm interrupted her. "I already used up this month's overclocking allotment."

  Remeny knew this wasn't true, but she approved of the lie and decided to join in.

  "Me too."

  "See, that's why we need a revolution," said Toybox, "so we can overclock whenever we want."

  "Yeah," said Botão, "and then we can ask Santa to bring us diamond trees so we can feed the unicorns."

  Remeny ignored them. "We're talking about getting real. You were saying, Sturm?"

  "We need a message." He considered. "What do we say to the oldschool?"

  "That EOS sucks." Toybox's avatar got up from the table and created a door in Silk's domain with a huge glowing red EXIT sign above it.

  "That's our complaint." Sturm shook his head. "But what do we want?"

  Nobody spoke for a moment.

  "How about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" said Botão.

  "Sure," said Sturm. "But those are just words until we explain what they mean."

  "No," Silk leaned forward on his seat. "She's right. We make that our slogan, put it out there, get people talking about it." He poked the table top. "Posters, T-shirts..."

  "Graffiti."

  "Timed-erase only," said Remeny. "Okay, there's your homework. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—ten times each."

  "Ten?" Toybox had his hand on the knob of his door. "How am I supposed to make ten hardtime changes from a stack?"

  "I don't know," she said. "Send your friends ten letters..."

  "He doesn't have ten friends."

  "... print stickies."

  "Write a song and record it." Botão warbled tunelessly. "Life for me needs liberty... umm... something something happiness."

  "That's it," said Remeny. "Next meeting at 1300 on Tuesday the 12th." She saved a transcript of their meeting to her student folder. "Got to go. Out of time."

  The biggest grievance that Remeny had against the government was that her Health Oversight Manager, aka her overlord, was too bossy. It forced her to exercise and monitored her diet. It required daily minimum times for being alone and for family interaction. Worst of all, if she didn't meet these goals, it could limit how long she could spend in softtime. Even after she turned twenty-one and could make her own decisions, it would still be watching her. It wasn't fair. Stash like Toybox and Sturm never had to wander around smelling the damn roses.

  She owed her overlord another hour and a half of family interaction and needed to burn three hundred calories exercising. It was now 1717. They had a family dinner scheduled softtime for 1930; that would kill an hour. If she jogged her five kilometer course at a decent pace between now and then, that would take care of her workout. But she still had to squeeze in at least another half hour of family time now, because Silk had said he might stop by ForSquare around 2100. She stripped off the NeuroSky 3100 interface that Dad had given her as a pre-graduation gift. She'd only had it a week and while she definitely liked it better than her old Deveau interface, the 3100's electrode array was sensitive to stubble. That meant she had to shave her head every other morning. Once she pulled out her nose plugs and peeled off her haptic gloves, she was once again Johanna Daugherty, age 18, of 7 Forest Ridge Road. She liked herself better as Remeny. She had chosen the name because it meant hope in Hungarian, but that was a secret. Nobody she knew spoke Hungarian.

  "Mom." She stuck her head out of her bedroom door and called down the hall. "I'm home."

  "Hi, honey. I made a banana smoothie. Some for you in the blender."

  Remeny put on her headset, positioned its glass ove
r her left eye and pressed the mic to her jaw, where it stuck. Headsets lacked cranial input so there was no soft-time immersion, but at least she could monitor what was happening online. "How many calories?"

  "I don't know. Three hundred? Four? Ask the fridge."

  The fridge reported that Mom had added a tablespoon of peanut butter to her usual recipe, which boosted the smoothie to four hundred and thirty calories. She decided to save it for dinner. Instead she got an Ice Cherry Zero out of the freezer.

  Mom was at her desk—wearing a glass headset. She had a Deveau interface for full immersion that she didn't use much. She was more comfortable with the old-school interfaces. And reality. She sat in the late afternoon gloom, her face lit from below by the windows on her desktop. When Remeny snicked on the overhead lights, Rachel Daugherty glanced up, blinking.

  "Thanks," she said.

  Mom's office was like a museum with its antique paper books on wooden shelves and family pix that didn't move. Hanging on the wall was an embroidered baby blanket in the Úrihímzés style that had belonged to Remeny's Hungarian great-grandmother. A trophy case held the tennis trophies that Mom had won in high school and college. The rubber plant in the window needed dusting.

  "So what's up, Mom?"

  "Work."

  Remeny leaned against the door frame and twirled the Cherry Zero in her mouth. "Work?"

  Mom sighed and waved a hand over the desktop, closing half the windows. "The health budget. We're running a surplus and I need to move some of it to building maintenance."

  "The people are in better shape than the buildings?" Remeny's lips tingled from the cold.

  "Buildings live in snow and rain and sleet and hail. People, not so much." A window flashed blue. "Speaking of being outside," she said, expanding it, "didn't I get an EOS advisory a couple of days ago? Something about your Phys Ed status?"

  "Took care of it." Remeny wished Mom would stop nagging her. "I already have an overlord, Rachel. I don't need an overmom too."

  "Sorry." Mom frowned; she didn't like it when her kids called her Rachel. "Look, I'm sorry, sweetie, but I'm really busy just now. You need some family time, is that it? Could you maybe go talk to your brother?"

  "I just spent two hours with him in coop."

  "Good." Mom's attention drifted back to her budgets. "How's that going?"

  "Okay, I guess. We gave ourselves homework. We're making it real."

  "That's nice."

  Silence.

  "Aren't you going to ask what our project is?"

  "Sure," said Mom, but then she started shuffling windows.

  "We're writing a declaration of independence," Remeny said.

  "Really?"

  Remeny dropped the empty Zero sleeve into the trash and waited. Then waited some more.

  "A declaration," she said, finally. "Of independence."

  "Umm... Didn't somebody already write that?"

  Too bad there were no blips in real life.

  "I guess I'll talk to Robby then."

  "You're a good sister." Mom nodded but did not look up. "Do a favor and turn him, would you?"

  Maybe it was best that Mom didn't know about their project. Rachel Daugherty was Bedford's Town Manager. She was part of the government they were declaring independence from.

  Robert Daugherty Junior's entire room was a deep twilight blue: walls, floor, ceiling, even the two painted-over windows that no longer looked onto Forest Ridge Road. When Remeny closed the door, shutting out the hallway light, the monotone color skewed the geometry of the space, erased the corners and curved the walls. Robby had just three glowworms and he kept them dimmed because of his photosensitivity; their slow crawl over the room's surfaces cast a changing pattern of dreamy radiance and midnight shadows. The only thing in the room that seemed solid was the carebot, which had tucked itself into a corner. Its eyestalk tilted toward her briefly to note her arrival, then returned its gaze to monitor her brother's naked, twitching body, suspended in its protective mesh. Robby had a state-of-theart stash; Mom had spent a boatload of Dad's money on her injured son after the attack. His intracranial interface was implanted directly into his cerebral cortex, which also helped relieve the worst of his dyskinetic thrashing. Robby could never have managed his avatar with an ordinary interface; his control over his movements had been so compromised by the neurotoxins in the DV gas that the True Patriots had used that he could barely feed himself. That was the carebot's job, as was cleaning up after him. Once, before the carebot, he had worn diapers. That hadn't worked out for anybody.

  =Oh Stormy.= She pinged him on their private channel. =Reality calling.=

  =Go away.= His reply scrolled across her glass.

  "Mom sent me to check up on you." She switched to speaking aloud and the mic on her headset reformatted for messaging. "Time for some sweet family togetherness."

  =Go online then.=

  "Nope. I need some hardtime." She queried her glass and opened his overlord account; they had each other's access. "And so do you."

  Even though they were twins, Robby's disabilities meant that he had different overlord quotas. He couldn't exercise and the carebot controlled his diet. He only owed an hour of hardtime a day, all of which was currently due. Remeny had never understood how waking up in a dark room to thrash around like a fish caught in a net could be good for anyone.

  "Blaaagh." Robby never re-entered hardtime in a good mood. "Shit."

  "Hello to you, too. Mom said something about a turning. You want?"

  "No." He coughed up a wad of phlegm and spat onto the floor. The carebot whirred out of its corner to clean it up. "I don't need... oh, go ahead."

  Robby's smartsilk net was the only furniture in the room. He rarely left it, even when he logged off, because of the fibromyalgia. His skin was sensitive to the slightest touch and the mesh distributed pressure points. It was suspended from the walls and ceiling so that its shape could be thermally reconfigured to roll him from one side to another, even from his back to his belly, to prevent bedsores.

  She swiped her finger halfway across the control screen and then up. Parts of the net stretched while others shrank.

  "Ow, ow oww." His fingers caught at the net while he kicked at the air. "Okay, enough. Stop."

  "Sorry."

  He came to rest facing her, eyes slits, eyelids gummy, curled into a fetal position as if to protect his erection. Seeing his cock didn't faze Remeny anymore. After helping to nurse him for the last couple of years, she had developed a high tolerance for brotherly ick.

  "I was fine, you know." Robby croaked at the carebot's eyestalk; he was talking to Mom. "You just turned me this morning, Rachel." Then he nodded at Remeny. "I'm three screens on her desktop. Can't even fart without setting off alarms."

  "I told her she was turning into the overmom."

  A head jerk scattered his smile.

  "So," she said, "think we can carry that loser Toybox?"

  "Sure." He sucked in a raspy breath. "Jason isn't so bad."

  "Jason, is it? He's a moron."

  Robby swallowed twice in rapid succession. " Ahhh. "

  "Pain?" she said

  "No."

  "You want a gun?" Ever since the attack, he'd had a fascination with the old handguns in the house. As if having a real one might have saved him. Still, handling them seemed to relieve his stress, which then calmed the spasms.

  "No."

  She waited for him to say something else. This was her day to be ignored by her family.

  "You were getting pretty weird on me in coop," she said at last.

  "Weird?"

  "Everyone for themselves. I've got the transcript in my folder. Revolutions don't play by the rules." She exaggerated a Sturm imitation, made his edges sharp enough to cut. " 'Speak for yourself, Botão. Maybe I am a terrorist.' Come on, Sturm. A terrorist? You're going to do other people like you were done?"

  "Right wing scum," he muttered. "Assholes."

  "Right wing, left wing—they're all assholes.
"

  "Revolution." He didn't seem very interested in the conversation.

  "What revolution?" She felt like he was pushing her toward a cliff. "What the hell are you talking about?" Then she noticed the edge of his overlord window in her glass. He wasn't getting hardtime credit for their conversation. "Wait a minute," she said. "You're still running your avatar?"

  "Huh?" He was confused. "What?"

  "This is me," she said. "Your sister." Remeny was at once impressed and insulted. It took supreme concentration to run an avatar in hardtime while carrying on a conversation in softtime. "You thought I wouldn't notice?" Then she guessed why he hadn't logged off. "You're with someone."

  "No."

  "I bet it's your little Button Bright."

  He writhed and his right arm flung itself up, grazing the top of his head. "What makes you say that?"

  "For one thing," she said, "you've got a bone like a dinosaur."

  "A second. Give me a second." He closed his eyes and his body went slack. Then with a shudder, he was back. The clock was ticking. She had his full attention.

  "Kind of a pervy thing to say to your brother." He gave her a grimace which she knew was a grin.