by Mur Lafferty
The problem with coding while stoned, Maria mused in a distant, observant way, was that all of the ethics she held on to seemed unimportant. This priest hated clones. He thought it was okay to kill people like her. Why not just hatchet out the hate and see what they were left with?
Well, the other part of her mind countered, she might get more broken bones if she did that. If he took her thumbs she would be in trouble.
Wait a moment. There. If you were good enough, you could follow the colors of the matrix like a literal map, finding connections of emotion to memories. They were hard to identify, more advanced than simply translating numbers and letters into the intricacies of the human mind. She did a search through the priest’s childhood, looking to see if she could link his faith with his dislike of clones.
Devout faith, deeply held belief in the glory of the Creator. Absolute disgust that anyone would want to step into His shoes.
Kill the Creator. Bingo.
They didn’t let Maria go, but they were kind enough to kill her quickly and send the body back to an Earth cloning facility so that she could wake up in a new clone with no memory of her Luna adventure. She was vaguely disquieted by the missing weeks. The cloning facility didn’t tell her how she had died, just that they had received the body, so she soon went back to her life.
Thus Maria was taken completely by surprise when, five years later, she was kidnapped and shipped to the moon.
January 3, 2287
“Dr. Arena, good to see you again,” Dr. Sibal said, sitting in a rolling lab chair. Maria on a wooden chair by the door, two large people flanking her.
Maria frowned. “Again?”
“We met before your last clone’s life ended. Regrettably, you didn’t get a chance to make a mindmap to remember me.”
Maria ran her hand through her hair. “Shit, you did that?”
He nodded once. “I needed you to do a job for me that was below the legal radar, as it were.”
“Everything I do is under the legal radar!” Maria said, looking around her and wondering if she had ever been in this room before, this sterile lab. “None of my other clients felt the need to kidnap me to hire me.”
“You did a fascinating job the first time we hired you,” Dr. Sibal said. “We got almost everything we wanted.”
“I was gone for a lot of the worldwide and Luna riots,” Maria said. She had studied the news from the missing weeks of her last life to see if she could figure out what had happened to her.
Realization dawned as she remembered the news from that time. “Ah, shit,” she added, covering her face with her hands. She lifted them and peeked out, as if the sun were shining. “That was me, wasn’t it? The job on the priest who came out pro-clone. Ensured the Codicils would pass. All me.”
“You did do some excellent work on Father Orman,” he said, steepling his fingers.
“I heard he fled the moon and your faction’s control,” Maria said. “Doesn’t sound like he was on your side even after whatever I did to him.”
Dr. Sibal waved his hand as if nothing mattered. “We got what we wanted.”
“What the hell are you talking about? There are more laws restricting clones than ever!”
“We have been named more than human,” Dr. Sibal said, leaning forward in his chair. “We are not bound by human laws. This allows for the next part of the plan.”
“You wanted these laws that outlawed hacking and all that?”
“It’s a step to a brighter future,” Sibal said. “Now, to your current job.”
Maria stood up. “No, I am not helping you out anymore. You make it harder for the rest of us.”
Two heavy hands came onto her shoulders and forced her back into the chair.
“You don’t have much of a choice,” Dr. Sibal said mildly. “We need a good hacker in our employ.”
Maria hated this feeling, that she should remember this man who clearly remembered her. That she should be able to figure a way off the moon—although the fact that she was here illegally might make it difficult to get back home. Shit.
She also hated the feeling of being forced into a job. But she didn’t have much of a choice. Sibal looked like he wouldn’t kill a fly, but he would hire someone to do so.
“What would I have to do?”
“I need a hatchet.”
Some of the less-than-ethical experiments done on clones had included the hatchets. A lab wanted to know if it could create sociopaths or psychopaths by cutting out whole parts of a personality, such as empathy, sympathy, and any memory of having loved or been loved. The shells that came out the other end were beyond the scientist’s expectations, and four of them had died before security could put the clones down.
The term hatchet referred to both the job done on the clone’s matrix and the fact that the clone had become a weapon when it was woken up.
Some had tried to give the procedure a sexier name. Both katana and morningstar were tried out, but neither stuck. Despite what you wanted to think of the clone as a weapon, there was nothing pretty about taking a hatchet to a person’s matrix.
“I won’t—” Maria started to say, and a fist slammed into her jaw. Actually a large shape stepped in front of her and punched her, but she only registered the fist itself for the next thirty seconds or so.
“You tried this last time, Dr. Arena,” Dr. Sibal said. “I will have you know that we broke you then, and we can break you now.”
“You killed me last time, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, but only after we broke you to do our work for us.”
She raised her head and worked her jaw to make sure it wasn’t broken. She struggled to find bravado where there was only cold fear. “Don’t, please,” she said. “Who is it?”
The cold self-loathing enveloped her as Sibal smiled. I’m not equipped to deal with torture, dammit. The thought did not comfort her.
The clone was a man from the Pan Pacific United countries, and she needed to do three hatchet jobs on three copies of his mindmap. The lab had multiplied him before, but never hacked him. Hating herself, Maria dutifully cut open the personality and memories of what seemed an innocent enough clone, and made three of him. Each lacked empathy, had a narcissistic superiority complex, and showed a doglike obedience to Dr. Sibal. She had considered making them homicidal to whoever woke them up, but it seemed the doctor was expecting such back doors, and warned her against inserting them.
She often worked into the night, her guards watching her. They would get bored from time to time, and read, or even doze, leaning against the door. Neither had a weapon she could steal, and both of them were large enough to overpower her even if she attacked while they slept. But they knew little enough about cloning so that they couldn’t tell when she wasn’t doing what she was told, and she banked on that.
She did her hatchet as best she could, but one late night as her guard dozed, Maria slipped her own mindmap drive out of her bracelet and plugged it into the computer. She hadn’t made a backup in weeks; this was last made on Earth, at a more innocent time.
Maria had never hacked herself before. She knew her profession was always dangerous and sometimes unethical (and this time very unethical), but the real thing holding her back was her refusal to look back at her own memories and personality. There was a lot you could deny about yourself, but you couldn’t argue with a mindmap. This time, though, she wasn’t there to argue with it.
If she couldn’t put a yadokari into hatchet jobs, she would put one in herself.
Hacking yourself was like tickling yourself. It was hard to do because while the mind is gullible when being fooled by things such as illusion and misdirection, it is surprisingly robust against a direct onslaught. And it’s hard to fool yourself with your own magic trick.
There is also the worry about royally fucking up your own mind. Maria was one of the best, but there were reasons why even the best doctors didn’t treat themselves or their families.
She couldn’t just put infor
mation in her own head. She would wake up, panicked that she was going mad, and not know what was real. She had to go in sideways.
Maria decided to re-create her imaginary friend. She had seen the holo-experience horror film Perkins’s Estate Sale when she was too young for it, and it had scared her to death—but the heroine, the elderly billionaire played by the dark-skinned American Latina actress Sophia Gomez, had seemed so strong and comforting to young Maria. She went about punishing her grandsons for trying to kill her and take her estate like a grandmother armed with a stern, no-nonsense attitude, and a chain saw.
Maria wanted Mrs. Perkins to be her grandmother. Whenever she was afraid of the dark as a child, she would imagine Mrs. Perkins saying, “When you walk up that dark road to my house” (the imaginary Mrs. Perkins lived up the road from Maria, past where the streetlights stopped), “you can’t see the monsters, Lucero. That’s true. But you know what? The monsters can’t see you, neither.”
So adult Maria began to give her Mrs. Perkins a bit more personality and opinions and, most important, information. Her old imaginary friend took form and lived tucked away in the mindmap of Maria’s subconscious where she waited with some key bits of information about Dr. Sibal, his Luna lab, his goals, and, crucially, her memories of this experience. She funneled as much data as she dared straight into Mrs. Perkins.
Triggering Mrs. Perkins would be more complicated. Hiding a packet of important data in your subconscious mind was one thing, but accessing it was something else. The subconscious wasn’t so easily accessed, like a mental grocery store that’s closed except from three to four a.m., and with a key you had to find in the dark. Maria stared at her own code, trying to figure out how to tell her next clone to find Mrs. Perkins.
She didn’t want to tie Mrs. Perkins to a dream. That was too risky; future clones might not believe the dream, or might put Mrs. Perkins in a bear suit watching Maria forget her lines on stage. She needed a powerful trigger to bring Mrs. Perkins to the forefront of her mind.
Then, eyes aching from the strain of staring at a bright screen, she laughed. The strongest non-stressful memory trigger was scent. And every time she woke up a new clone, the first thing she did was go for comfort food.
Coquito acaramelado—her aunt used to make them for snacks on special occasions. Coconut and sweet milk and caramel—sometimes chocolate—but the smell was like a blanket wrapping around Maria. It was love and safety and what she needed when she was newly woken and dealing with the slight disorientation new clones experienced.
When she lived in Miami, Cuban street vendors selling sweets were plentiful. But she had moved to Firetown, New York City, to be closer to Sallie Mignon if she needed her. This limited her comfort food options, so she usually just made her own.
She put a thin thread of code attached to the redolent smell of coquito acaramelado and tied it to the mental box containing her new Jiminy Cricket. No one had figured out how to code a legitimate AI and implant it into a person, but Maria had to wonder if Mrs. Perkins was the closest yet.
As thrilled as she was with her creation, she hated the irony knowing no one would ever realize her achievement. She may never know it herself.
During the day she continued her hatchet job on the poor mindmaps of the man she was turning into a psychopath. During the evening, she worked on her own mindmap, making Mrs. Perkins into a stronger persona.
When she said she was done with the assigned mindmaps, two days before Sibal’s deadline, he locked her into the small office that had been converted to a sleeping space for her. She didn’t mind that much, taking time to recover from the mental and physical exhaustion. Every day she would wake up and touch the drive on her bracelet to make sure it was there. She slept and read for the next two weeks, so tired she couldn’t even get bored. Or feel guilty. That would come later, she was sure. Mrs. Perkins would see to it.
One day Dr. Sibal walked into her room, smiling. “The job is done. You did very well. I may have to employ you again.”
Maria thought of several snarky things to say, but just winced as the gun came up. “Make it qui—” she said before he shot her.
Maria Arena paid the bill for the cloning, a little troubled that the last clone had only lasted five years. She was missing another several weeks. She had no report on the state of her body on delivery. The cloning lab manager claimed the information they took on the body had been lost after the body’s cremation. It happened sometimes, he assured her.
She called for a car to take her home, went to the apartment in Firetown that Sallie Mignon had given her, unlocked her door with her handprint, and collapsed on the sofa. Normally she craved food and a nap after waking up, but now she was fidgety and couldn’t focus.
She tried to parse out the events, but her last mindmap had been a routine one. She hadn’t done a job for Sallie in months, and she’d been living comfortably on her retainer while waiting for a job.
Maybe Sallie knew something about what was going on.
She went to her bedroom and changed out of the simple jumpsuit the cloning lab had fitted her with. She put on flannel pajamas and a fluffy robe.
She would call Sallie tomorrow. For now, she would make dinner and go to bed. After some homemade coquito acaramelado, naturally.
As she made them, she pictured her aunt in her kitchen, stirring the sweet milk and coconut together. Only this time her aunt had much darker skin, and was much older than her memory. And while in one hand she held the wooden spoon for stirring, in her other hand she hefted a small—but definitely lethal—chain saw.
“That’s different,” she said, and kept stirring. The memories came stronger now, her aunt slowly stirring and looking at her. The memory wasn’t that of comfort food and love, it was of fierce protection from obvious danger. As Aunt Lucia stirred, the window behind her showed a vast wasteland, with inky black skies and shining white dust. Hanging in the sky was the Earth, blue and white.
Aunt Lucia had never traveled to the moon. The Luna colony was still being established in her time, and travel between the moon and Earth was incredibly expensive.
My Maria, the woman in her memory said. Aunt Lucia hadn’t spoken much English, and now her words had a much more American accent. You’re in danger. They take you and they use you. Your beautiful skills, they use them to harm others. Then they dispose of you. They will come again when they need you. You must get protection.
Here, Aunt Lucia hefted the chain saw in her other hand. Be strong.
It was one of those dreams where she knew it was Aunt Lucia even though it looked like Mrs. Perkins from that horror movie she loved from years back.
She snapped back to herself in shock. She wasn’t asleep and this wasn’t a dream. “You’re really in there, aren’t you?” she asked, tapping her forehead.
Her vision blurred and then Mrs. Perkins was sitting in a rocking chair on her porch. Her chain saw was on the floor by her chair, the motor grumbling to itself. She sipped a glass of ice water. Condensation was beading on the glass even though they were still outside the Luna dome. They should be asphyxiating and having heart attacks by now.
I’m what you made me, my Maria, she said. You put me here to warn you.
Maria concentrated and she was on the porch by the old woman in her mind. “I made you? When did I have access to a computer that strong?”
“The last time they took you. They had you do some work for them, bad work.” Against the sky, news sites flashed announcing the assassination of a Japanese diplomat who was working on clones’ rights. The picture of a young Japanese man, the main suspect, appeared next to it.
The chain saw stopped grumbling. It had become an ax—no, the handle was too short. It was a hatchet, lying on the floor of the porch, stained with blood.
“Oh shit,” Maria said, sinking back into one of the rocking chairs. “So I put you into my own mindmap? I must have been pretty desperate.”
The old woman’s thin white eyebrows lifted, and she said, “They to
ok you. They hurt you when you wouldn’t obey. They will do it again. That’s why you made me. To warn you.”
“Because I wasn’t able to make a mindmap before they killed me. But I could hack my existing one,” Maria said, the dawning horror making her flesh crawl. She became selfishly grateful that she didn’t remember whatever they had done to her.
“I need to talk to Sallie,” Maria said.
“Probably. I wouldn’t trust her either.” Mrs. Perkins returned her gentle gaze to the lunar landscape.
“What? Did I tell you to tell me that?”
“No, but she is very powerful. And it was a powerful man who keeps doing this to you. People in power are dangerous.”
“That’s an interesting logical jump for an AI to make,” she said thoughtfully. “I’ll be careful, but as you said, I need someone to protect me.”
They rocked on the porch for a bit, Maria thinking and oddly enjoying the companionable presence of the AI she had developed. She wanted to ask her so many questions, but wasn’t sure where to start.
“Is there anything else you’re supposed to tell me?” she asked.
“Good Christ on a cross, child,” Mrs. Perkins said, stopping her chair mid-rock. “Were you not listening? You keep getting kidnapped and forced to do unspeakable things. Protect yourself. Trust none of those people you think mean you no harm.”
She started rocking again, closing her eyes as if on a warm and sunny porch. “Oh, and maybe you should think about another career. This hacking thing is dangerous. You should try something nice, like cooking.”
Maria came back to herself, her mind a storm of wonder and fear. The milk and sugar had burned into a napalm-like mess, and she hurriedly pushed the pan off the hot element.
She had done something no one had ever done before. And to her own mind. She’d created a yadokari she could actually access.
