by Mur Lafferty
The hackers didn’t look good, admittedly, after the bathtub babies and other illegal and unethical actions. When those news stories broke, the riots against cloning started, and things got dangerous.
Maria had worked for years perfecting the art of mindmap manipulation. She’d never even shoplifted before. Now she was breaking much larger laws. And now the most powerful person in the country wanted her services.
“I don’t comply in the murder of innocents, I won’t be party to building a superman, and my fees are non-negotiable,” Maria said, sitting down at the kitchen table and crossing her legs. She felt more at home discussing her business instead of being intimidated by a powerful figure.
Sallie shook her head, sitting down across from Maria. “I’m not asking for any of that.” She jerked her head toward a closed door on the far wall. “I want to know if you’ll hack my partner, Jerome. It’s his first life. He’s going to be cloned, but he’s got MS. His brother, his father, and his grandmother all have it. He’s dying. If I clone him the way he is, he will have to look forward to pain and a slow roll downhill every life. And we don’t know how long he will live. He wants to kill himself now, and I can’t let him. I can’t.”
“Removing MS? Is that all? I can do that.” She had done worse, for less. The day after she had manipulated an infant’s DNA to make her have blue eyes and a prettier face, as well as remove the mutation that caused cerebral palsy, she had drunk herself into a stupor. She told herself she hadn’t had a part in the girl’s infanticide, that crime the parents had on their consciences, but her hands still felt dirty.
She dipped her hand into her jacket’s interior pocket to fetch her terms. She passed the tablet across the table, the file with her information open. “Price. What I will do and what I won’t do. Risks involved with messing with someone’s DNA matrix. And the legal ramifications if we get caught.”
Sallie’s eyes skimmed the screen with the practiced ease of someone looking for a “gotcha” in a contract. “I cover your legal fees if you’re caught. Nice touch.”
Maria shrugged. “Self-preservation is one of the signs of sentient life,” she said.
Sallie put her thumb on the tablet’s sensor, signing the document. Without looking up, she said, “If you’re doing something illegal, then isn’t this contract pointless?”
“I like to keep track of my clients and be able to remind them what we had agreed to,” Maria said. She handed Sallie an empty memory drive. “Put his mindmap on here. I’ll take him home and deal with it. You can have him back tomorrow.”
“You can do the programming here. Please,” Sallie said, the steel in her voice countering the politeness of the words. “I am not in the habit of letting my partner’s matrix out the door, much less out of the state.”
Maria sighed. “And I am not in the habit of using someone else’s network to do my type of work. Which is highly illegal, as you said. I know the security on my home system, but I don’t know yours.”
“Is this a dealbreaker?” she asked, eyes holding Maria’s. “You’d be throwing away millions of yuan.”
Maria’s investments hadn’t been the best in her first decades as a clone, and she wasn’t as wealthy as she would like to be. But too many traps, tracers, and spiders could trace her work if she wasn’t 100 percent secure, and it could hurt her legally and professionally if her proprietary code got out.
She bit her lip, and then nodded. “Yes. It’s far too risky.” She stood up. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Ms. Mignon. It’s a pleasure to have met you.” She held out her hand.
Sallie stared at the hand, and then laughed. “Finally, someone with a spine. Fine. You can use your home system.”
Maria let out a sigh, not expecting this to be a test of her mettle.
Sallie grabbed a drive off the kitchen counter. “But I’m going with you.”
One call to a caretaker for Jerome, one call to the private stable hand who managed Sallie’s fleet of self-driving cars, one call to the airport, and the donning of a leather jacket over Maria’s dirty sweatshirt later, and Maria and Sallie were gliding through New York City traffic toward JFK.
“Don’t you want to tell your kids good-bye?” Maria asked.
“I had a feeling I would be going on a trip today, so they already know.”
“How did you know you’d be coming back with me?”
“I have studied you, Maria. I’m not in the practice of hiring fools. I knew you wouldn’t want to work on my network.”
They went through a cursory security check done for the very powerful, and then they were in first class.
“Why didn’t you bring Jerome to see me, if you knew you’d be coming to Florida?” Maria asked.
“Because I wanted to meet you first,” Sallie said. “Easier that way, in case I was wrong about you.”
“I’m surprised you don’t have your own jet. Don’t you own all of Firetown?” Maria asked.
“I don’t like to fly. I don’t see any point in spending more on flight than I need to.” Sallie accepted both mimosas offered by the flight attendant. She downed one and held the other one, not passing it to Maria.
Maria wondered if she had left her apartment clean this morning.
“Do you like living in Florida?” Sallie asked, holding her hand up to the flight attendant. “Two mimosas for my friend here.”
“Yes, Ms. Mignon,” he said deferentially.
“It’s nice,” Maria said. “I’m close enough to Cuba to visit easily but far enough away that my family doesn’t get uncomfortable.”
Sallie laughed. “You still have family?”
“Sure, we all do. I never had kids, but occasionally a great-great-great-nephew or -niece will seek me out and ask for a favor.”
“Parasites,” Sallie said.
Maria shook her head. “Family. It’s usually no problem for me to help them out.”
“You’re generous,” Sallie said. “I wouldn’t be such a pushover. It doesn’t teach them anything.”
“Why do I have to teach them anything?” Maria asked. “Does every encounter need to teach them something?”
She took the offered mimosas and drank one quickly, then nursed the second one. The attendant came back to retrieve their empty glasses, and they sat in silence through the flight safety information. Sallie watched the attendant; Maria watched Sallie, amazed to see someone be so focused on the oft-repeated information.
The plane shuddered slightly as it rose into the air. Sallie kept her eyes on the seat in front of her. “People are like dogs,” she said as if they hadn’t broken the conversation. “Every moment teaches them something. They whine at the door, you let them out because the whining is annoying you, they learn that whining opens the door. You give them a treat before your evening glass of wine, then the dog learns that when that bottle comes out, a treat is supposed to follow it.”
“And if you give a relative some money, do you teach them not to work? Is that your opinion of charity and gifts in general?” Maria asked.
“I like giving to people who really need it, and those who earn it, not lazy people who won’t work. Do your relatives work?”
“I like to think that they don’t need to fill out an application to get a gift from their aunt,” Maria said stiffly.
“Calm down, I’m not going to take away your family’s lollipops,” Sallie said, relaxing slightly. “I was just making conversation.”
Maria looked at Sallie’s posture and her hands flat on her knees in the perfect image of relaxation. Too perfect. “Sallie, why were you so eager to fly home with me if you hate flying so much?” she asked.
Sallie winced. “I wish you hadn’t brought it up,” she said.
“So answer in as few words as possible,” Maria suggested.
“I don’t like to do it. But I have to do it for business. All the time. You can’t own buildings in Pan Pacific if you don’t ever go there. It’s bad investing.”
“So you’re like someon
e who’s afraid of needles who needs frequent allergy shots or something?” Maria asked.
“Pretty much,” Sallie said. “Can we argue about your deadbeat family again?”
“It’s a short flight, don’t worry about it.”
“That’s because we’re going so damn fast,” Sallie said. “Flights used to take longer, but they were slower and safer.”
“I’m fairly sure if you hit the ground going five hundred miles per hour, you’re as dead as you would be going twelve hundred fifty miles per hour.”
Sallie gritted her teeth. “That’s not helping.”
They talked about Sallie’s kids and Maria’s nieces and nephews for the rest of the flight, and once they touched down in Miami, Sallie’s posture was almost that of a human’s.
Maria lived in a run-down apartment building south of Miami in a neighborhood that was not considered the best. They passed a few really old cars that still required drivers, rusty and battered. Auto mechanics had a good business going keeping old-time cars running since self-driving cars had become the norm. Now the only people who drove cars were rich people who liked the freedom and the novelty, and poor people who couldn’t afford to upgrade to self-driving.
Maria appreciated that Sallie didn’t say anything about their destination, but then realized that she probably already knew all of her personal details, if she had been doing research on Maria. When they got to Maria’s third-floor flat, Maria took out her key card, slid it in, and took a small black box out of her purse. She pointed it at the door and lasers turned on to make a number pad appear. She keyed in a seven-digit code and turned off the laser. The door popped open.
Sallie raised an eyebrow. “You weren’t kidding about security.”
Maria grinned. “That’s just the start of it.”
She opened her door and ushered Sallie in. The dark-brown floors were dotted here and there with white, fluffy rugs. Her living room furniture was all black leather, pointing at a wall where a gas fireplace sat decoratively. From the ceiling hung a square projector, designed to show video on her white wall. Art, done by a lot of the modern-day surrealists, splashed along the walls, including one striking “piece” of purples and reds.
Sallie pointed at it. “Is that a Fogarty?” she asked. “Painted directly on your wall?”
“Yeah,” Maria said, heading into her bedroom to lose the business suit. “He’s a friend.”
“Did you hire him to paint it?” Sallie called from the living room.
Maria laid her suit on her unmade bed and got some jeans and a T-shirt from her drawer. “Not exactly. I was hosting a party and he got drunk and decided to declare his love for me. So he went to town on my wall. First I was mad, and then I thought I had the most expensive wall in Miami, and was okay with it.”
It sounded as if Sallie had moved on to another painting. “Van Gogh could have learned something from him. Did you two date?”
“Briefly,” Maria said. “There wasn’t much of a spark there. But damn, he could paint.”
“I was pondering doing a patronage program to fund artists’ cloning efforts,” Sallie said. “We were going to support them and clone them so they could continue creating. But Jerome said it sounded like indentured servitude.” She made a face.
“It does kind of sound like you want them to keep creating, but if they quit, then you won’t clone them anymore.”
“That’s a bit extreme. And how can you stop a creator from creating? I found different places to put my money.”
Maria finished getting dressed. She left her bedroom and saw Sallie in front of another Fogarty original, this one properly on a canvas. Sallie pointed back to the on-the-wall art piece. “Is that why you haven’t moved?”
“It’s one reason,” she said. “Other reasons include I started sprucing the place up when I started making money, and then realized if I left, I’d have to set a new place up with all these measures. So I just stayed. Makes me less of a target for theft, so long as I keep my head down.”
“And doesn’t make people assume you’re a wealthy hacker either,” Sallie said.
Maria grinned. “That too.” She held her hand out. “Now, let’s look at this DNA matrix.”
After two hours of studying the code that made Jerome’s mindmap, Maria identified the genetic anomaly that led to later-life MS. She inserted code to comment out the data and cleaned up around it so the new DNA wouldn’t try to grasp onto a missing strand.
“Why don’t you just delete it?” Sallie asked.
“Too dangerous. Anyway, commenting out the code means that it’s still there, so if I mess something up, I can revert to the old code.”
“So you don’t keep backups?”
Maria kept her eyes on the screen. “No, keeping backups of peoples’ maps for personal use is unethical. My clients get back all the data they gave to me.”
She offered Sallie a beverage while she took a break, and rubbed her eyes as the coffee brewed.
“Thank you for doing this,” Sallie said, looking tired and a little wide-eyed. “You are as good as people said you are.”
“Thank you,” Maria said, getting mugs.
“I’m curious,” Sallie said. “While you’re in there, can you change a few other things?”
“Depends on what it is, but sure.”
“Make him love me more. Make him never cheat on me again. Make him not be angry that I cloned him,” Sallie said bitterly.
Maria turned in surprise, blanching at the pain on Sallie’s face. “He hasn’t consented to the cloning?”
“Not yet. He’s going to die soon, and he’s worried we will have problems when he is twenty-five again and I’ll still look in my fifties. Never mind that I reminded him I am much older than he is. He doesn’t understand.”
Maria shook her head. “Most don’t, until they’ve been cloned.” She paused, chewing on her lip. “Are you serious, about those things you want?”
Sallie returned from her anguish for a moment and wiped at her eyes. “Do you think you can do something that intricate? I didn’t think it was actually possible.”
Maria shrugged uncomfortably. “Not many people can do it. It’s what I do best, though, which is why I’m still doing it on the black market. I can do a lot of what you asked for. Not everything. Every hack I do to a personality is dangerous, though. Cutting out the MS from a matrix was easy. Messing with a person’s sense of self, their emotions, that’s more complex. It’s risky.”
Sallie stared at the numbers on the screen, flashing different colors in a language that Maria knew well. She nodded, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Do it.”
Maria turned back to the terminal and hunted again through the terabytes of information, looking for love, infidelity, and forgiveness. She began to program the changes to Sallie’s partner.
At this point, she wasn’t in a position to judge her clients.
But she never saw that vulnerable, teary-eyed version of Sallie again.
119 Years Ago
October 1, 2374
The reporter was young and white, with a Roman numeral I tattooed on her wrist. This was the fad of the time, where humans liked to show via tattoo that they were the first of a long line, intending on being cloned on their death. It was like calling something the first annual celebration. You can’t have a first until you have a second.
Maria hadn’t wanted to come to this meeting. But she’d been on retainer for Sallie Mignon for almost a hundred years, and had amassed quite a bit of wealth. She did what Sallie asked.
The reporter had tattoos on her face, another luxury of the non-clone lifestyle. She had a star on her left cheek and half of her head was shaved, with more stars along her scalp. Her right side had long, straight blue hair.
She’d been brazenly writing on both sides of the clone riots, crowing about being balanced with her reporting, but not hesitating to dig up very old dirt on some prominent clones. Annoying as she was, she was as good at doing research as Maria was hunti
ng through mindmap code. Sallie had put her on the payroll because she admired her moxie.
Her name was Martini, and that’s what she drank, the finest vodka that Sallie could buy. After the drinks arrived (whiskey for Sallie and Maria), Sallie smiled pleasantly. She got out her tablet and pulled up the front page of the New York Times. TERRORIST CLONES RIOT WORLD- AND LUNA-WIDE, DOZENS INJURED IN ATTEMPT TO SABOTAGE NEW GENERATION STARSHIP DORMIRE: LAUNCH DELAYED POSSIBLY BY YEARS blasted across the front, with a picture of Luna taken from outside the dome. Someone had been murdered messily on the other side, close enough to splatter blood on the synthetic diamond structure.
Some Pulitzer-seeking photojournalist had ventured outside in an enviro suit just to get that photo.
“What went wrong here?” Sallie asked Martini.
Martini shrugged. “Clones don’t like that humans get to colonize the new planet. They rioted, tried to bust up the ship. Didn’t you read the story?”
Maria hid a grimace behind her glass. This woman hadn’t been in Sallie’s employ long enough to discover what to say and, more important, what not to say.
“I mean, I don’t control the news. How do clones expect to come back from that and still look like the good guys?” she continued.
“I pay you to control the news,” Sallie said. “How you do it, I don’t care. But you tell the story that benefits clones on a large scale, me on a small scale. There are tens of thousands of clones, many of us working well within humanity’s laws. And we were working to get a server on that ship so that clones may travel to Artemis as well. And yet your paper labels us terrorists.”
“But—” Martini said, but Sallie was on a roll.
“Extremist individuals live inside every single group on the planet. Devout followers from Christian to Muslim who kill in the name of God, down to people who perpetuate a cycle of abuse from parent to child. And do you know at what point they’re labeled as terrorists?”
Martini said. “When the government—”
