Asimov's SF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  With a disappointed trudge, Christopher joined the throng of children. Nathan drove off down a side street, and concentrated on navigating through the speed-bumps and silly little mini-roundabouts the council had installed. He couldn't dispel the images from his mind: Jenny blowing out the candles on her birthday cake; Jenny in the hospital, in the mortuary, laid out in her child-size coffin....

  He pulled into a parking space, then took a deep breath and a gulp of water. It's not real, he told himself. It's not my daughter. But it didn't help. Nathan felt as if he'd dropped his brain on the kitchen floor, then tried to pick up the bits and reassemble his mind—but too many pieces had rolled under the fridge, so that his skull ended up stuffed with crud and fluff and other people's spillages.

  Sitting inside the car made him feel sick. He walked to a nearby bench, where he booted up his laptop and downloaded the usual blizzard of emails. Nathan worked in the pensions industry, which was constantly in flux as the Government struggled to persuade people to save more for their ever-lengthening old age. The emails contained links to regulations, explanations, and valuations, along with various questions and draft reports from his office AI. Nathan ploughed through his inbox, dispatching succinct haphazardly spelled replies.

  He noticed the time and shook his head. As ever, he'd spent a little too long doing email. His client load had swelled when PDMH offloaded consultants in a cost-cutting drive; foreseeing the layoffs, he'd previously volunteered to take on extra territory. But it put him constantly on the back foot, scurrying everywhere at the last minute.

  Nathan returned to his car and put the radio on loud in an effort to drown out the thoughts—Jenny with compost in her hair as she planted tomato and cucumber seeds; Jenny dashing to the greenhouse every morning to see if they'd sprouted—that the implant pumped into him. Even when he reached the main road, he found it hard to drive over thirty miles per hour. Cars kept honking, and overtaking with disdainful revs of their engines.

  He listened to the sports round-up, focusing on the rescheduled Grand Prix race—he had a spread-bet on Ferrari for the Formula 1 constructors’ championship. The news update followed. “It's ten o'clock on Wednesday the nineteenth of January, and here with the latest headlines—"

  January 19th: Jenny's birthday. Memories of all her past birthdays slid into Nathan's brain in a montage of cakes and presents and singing and parties. She would have been seven this year. But there'd be no more birthdays, no more anything. Just a silent house—the room left untouched, the dust slowly settling on her clothes, her dolls, her colorful scribblings blu-tacked to the wall.

  This is how it feels: an empty garden where everything once green is now grey; a frozen pond with ice all the way down; a compost heap where rats endlessly gnaw at the rotting scraps of your heart....

  Nathan braked, narrowly missing a cyclist as he pulled over and stopped the car. He began to cry, then angrily wiped his eyes. Jenny wasn't his daughter. Christopher didn't have a sister. But the transplanted emotion felt as real—more real—than his own memory.

  It affected his driving. As, indeed, it was intended to. He'd known its purpose, but with brash confidence he'd thought he would soon get used to the implant, soon master it. Instead, it had mastered him. Today was the worst it had ever been.

  Looking at the dashboard dial showing the miles left to drive, Nathan knew he couldn't reach Oswestry in time for the meeting. He'd have to phone Alan Selden, the secretary to the trustees, and apologize. Nathan pounded the steering wheel in frustration. He could claim his car had broken down, was stuck in traffic, whatever—but he didn't want to lie. Besides, Alan was a bluff Welshman who responded better to an honest admission of cock-up than to flimsy excuses. Nathan remembered the trustees’ fund manager explaining why he'd underperformed the benchmark: “We made a pig's ear of it! We picked the wrong sectors and it all went south when the recession hit.” The trustees had warmed to the manager's openness, and instead of sacking him had given him a deadline to turn performance around.

  Nathan called his client. “Sorry—I'm stuck outside Manchester and I can't get to the meeting."

  “What's the problem?” said Alan brusquely.

  “I've got an implant that's doing my head in. I was clocked three times on speed cameras and I had a choice between losing my license, or having an implant. It's from some guy whose daughter was run over by a speeding motorist. Twelve-month sentence. I thought I could live with it, but it's really messing me up. It doesn't matter what road I'm on, I just can't go over thirty. I keep getting these visions of—” Nathan stopped, conscious that he was gabbling.

  “Sorry to hear it. Those implants can be tough—my brother-in-law got one for drunk driving, and now he can barely have half a shandy down the pub. Still, if you can't drive fast, you could have set off earlier."

  “Had to get the young lad to school. My wife's on tour—playing Glasgow tonight."

  “Then you should have made other arrangements. We're running a business, not a daycare center. And the FD's been saying we should re-tender the contract, that pensions just keep sucking money out of the company and we need to plug the leak."

  Nathan swallowed hard, suppressing his resentment at the implied insult to his consultancy.

  Alan went on, “We'll postpone your bit until we've looked at the corporate restructuring. I'll send you the minutes after the meeting."

  “Okay—let me know when you want to reschedule. And again, I'm sorry about this.” Nathan hung up, then tried to slow his breathing with one of the calming exercises from his wife's meditation manual.

  Alan's attitude ticked him off, yet he couldn't blame the man. And this wasn't the first client appointment he'd had trouble reaching. The other day, he'd only just squeezed into the Liverpool conference, after everyone else had already finished coffee-and-hello.

  This couldn't go on. He couldn't keep trying to shrug off the implant's effects as he might shrug off the flu. His mind had no immune system, no memetic antibodies to neutralize the foreign sentiments dripping into his brain.

  Yet what could he do? If he went back to court, they might allow the alternative sentence of losing his driving license. But he needed to drive: that was why he'd originally accepted the implant. His clients were scattered across the map like pimples on the arse-end of nowhere—shabby coastal resorts; industrial estates in decayed conurbations; abandoned farms converted into rural micro-businesses.

  He had to keep his license. His job depended on driving, and his family depended on his job; Yvonne barely earned enough to cover her touring costs. So, the implant would have to be dealt with.

  There was a black market in implant-inhibitors: antidotes, overwrites, open-source hypno-hacks too new to even be illegal. Nathan knew he could find a backstreet chopshop and pay a tattooed modgod to open up his brain and tinker with it. They'd leave the external feed intact, to pass the monthly probation check-ups, but the internal input could be rerouted, transformed with dream illogic into something less intrusive.

  Yes, the chopshops could bypass an implant—if you trusted them. The official justice-chips were bad enough; the Conspiracy Channel claimed they had subperceptual phasing effects to make people pollute less, recycle more, Vote LabDem, turn into zombies when someone in a secret bunker pressed a big red button. But the under the counter stuff ... who knew what was in it? The modgods could tag anything to the implant override—malware memes, subtle cravings for certain products or behaviors—and you wouldn't even notice until the end of the month when your bank balance ran out and you wondered why you'd donated all your money to obscure offshore charities.

  An illegal shunt might do anything. Nathan wasn't that desperate, not yet. Still, if he started losing clients, he'd risk PDMH marking him down for the next cull. Soon he might have no choice.

  He needed another answer. He needed some way to nullify the chip's impact. Until now, he'd been trying to escape the dripfeed of false feeling, trying to run away inside his head. But that couldn't w
ork—like a child scared of going to school, he would never master the problem until he faced its source.

  Nathan had to confront the implant and expose its unreality. When he could experience the artificial emotion and truly know that it wasn't real, then the illusion of grief would lose its power. He needed to see the underlying truth, to make the falsehood wither away.

  The truth began with a dead girl: Jenny ... something. Jenny who? Nathan turned on his laptop and delved through the disclosures and waivers relating to the judicial implant. A name surfaced: Pigalle. It echoed faintly in his mind. He searched online cemetery records for the name Jenny Pigalle. Nothing. He tried again, looking for Jennifer Pigalle.

  Lawnswood Cemetery in Leeds had a Jennifer Pigalle, and the dates looked right. Six years. Only six years, seven months. She would never grow up, never choose what subjects to study or sports to play, never agonize over which job to take, which boy to date.... Furiously, Nathan put his hands over his eyes, pressing his eyeballs so hard that the tears came from pain rather than grief.

  He set off for Leeds, a jaunt across the Pennines on the M62. The journey would interrupt his afternoon schedule of conference calls and the ever-urgent paperwork. But if necessary he'd postpone some of that, until it became tomorrow's last-minute rush. After all, what would life be like without a mad dash to meetings and deadlines? He sometimes felt that if he didn't wake up with six urgent things to do before breakfast, he wouldn't know what to do—he'd just lie in bed until his cellphone prodded him into life.

  Two hours of slow driving later, Nathan pulled up outside Lawnswood Cemetery. The website gave him a tagged map of the plots. Not wanting to carry the laptop with him, he glanced at the map, then locked all his gear in the back of the car.

  Flanking the cemetery gates, carved gryphons gazed at him impassively, their stone the same dull grey as the drizzle-soaked sky. As he paced along the graveled paths, Nathan saw dates and epitaphs on lichen-splotched tombs. With professional interest, he noted the mortality stats of prior decades: the cohorts of workers who'd died in middle age, barely drawing any pension. There was once a time when the Queen sent a congratulatory telegram to anyone who reached their hundredth birthday; now she was a centenarian herself, with poor Charles still the eternal heir to the throne in his eighties.

  The cemetery lacked visitors, save for someone walking their dog around the perimeter. A biting breeze blew dead leaves across the graves. Nathan hunched his shoulders and huddled into himself; he'd worn a smart suit anticipating an indoor meeting, not a wet and windy graveyard. In the distance, beyond the ivy-choked fence, he heard the jackhammer beat of dance music.

  He entered a new wing of the cemetery, where the headstones had crisp edges and uneroded inscriptions. Wreaths lay askew, battered by the wind. Electric candles shone with brittle sparks of memory. Occasionally a motion-activated hologram would spring up from a grave, offering recorded greetings and AI-simulated conversation, like a ghost eager to hear the day's news from the corporeal world; then, as Nathan moved out of range, the holograms would fade back down into the earth as if they had failed an audition to return to life.

  At a bend in the path he looked around, unsure of his location relative to the map, but relishing the uncertainty as proof that he didn't belong here, that he had no connection to this place. He scanned the nearby graves, and saw a white headstone with incised black script.

  * * * *

  JENNIFER VIVIAN PIGALLE

  Born 19 January 2026

  Died 25 August 2032

  Beloved daughter of Lawrence and Martha

  A heaven-sent flower plucked too soon

  * * * *

  In Nathan's mind, a torrent of emotion poured forth, a kaleidoscope of remembered games and cuddles and tantrums and let's pretends. He didn't try to push it back, but let the grief wash over him, all the while thinking, This isn't mine. I have never been here before.

  As he stepped toward the grave, a small hologram appeared—a young girl with long fair hair, dressed in white and carrying a toy koala, her lips smudged with ice cream. Nathan recognized her from his implant-haunted dreams, and his heart stuttered.

  She frowned. “Who are you? You're not my daddy!"

  “No. I'm not your father.” Nathan spoke with emphasis, trying to etch the words into his brain.

  “Are you digging our garden? I want rhodo—, rho—, rhodo-dodo-dodo-dendrons!” She spoke in sing-song, tapping her foot in midair at each “rhodo” and “dodo."

  “I'm sorry. I'm not digging your garden.” In the implant's memories, his daughter lay sprawled on the lawn while he recited all the flowers for her, all the daisies and pansies and roses, and he made up silly names for the blooms he didn't know, so that she giggled at “angel's slippers” and “fairy feathers” and “true love waits by the cabbages."

  That wasn't my garden. This isn't my daughter. She doesn't even look like me, or like Yvonne. The cognitive dissonance dazed him, but he embraced it like Orwell's Winston Smith accepting that two plus two made five. Only by confronting it could he overcome it.

  Jenny wailed, with a thin synthetic howl. “Go away, you bad man!"

  Reflexively, Nathan stepped back. The hologram vanished. His false emotion remained, squatting inside his head like a sluggish toad. Nathan knew that the grief overlay wouldn't disappear—it couldn't disappear, because the implant kept feeding it in. But he could force it to hibernate in its own little nest, and stop swamping his brain.

  Nathan stared at the gravestone. The emotion in his mind felt as artificial as the taste of cheap strawberry-flavored sweets. As it became more distinct from his genuine feelings, it became a little easier to ... not ignore, but disregard. He felt that this expedition had definitely helped. He'd seized a shard of reality that he could cling onto whenever the implant's unreal sentiments threatened to overwhelm him.

  “Who the fuck are you?” said a harsh voice to his left.

  Nathan jumped at the interruption, then turned and saw a man with shaggy blond hair, wearing a long black raincoat and muddy shoes. He carried a jam-jar full of yellow chrysanthemums.

  “You must be the father,” Nathan realized. Instinctively he rubbed the shiny spot behind his ear, before regaining control of his hand and stuffing it in his pocket.

  The man's gaze followed the gesture. “You have an implant?” His gaunt face looked as raw and ragged as a half-finished taxidermist's specimen. “Is that my implant? Are you one of those speeders who got sentenced with it?"

  Nathan nodded. “Yes. I'm sorry to disturb you—"

  “So you should be! What the hell are you doing here on my daughter's birthday? Are you one of those Conspiracy Channel fuckheads? You think it's all fake?” He stepped forward and pointed at the grave. “What do you want me to do, dig up Jenny's coffin and show you the bones?"

  As he moved within range, the hologram appeared. “Daddy! You brought me flowers!” Jenny smiled as if it were summer, as if they were all about to go on a long-awaited holiday together.

  “Yes, sweetie. But I see you've had a visitor. Did he introduce himself ? This is the man who killed you!"

  “I did not!” exclaimed an outraged Nathan.

  “You could have,” said Pigalle in his low, cracked voice. “You're just the same as the guy who did kill her. Speeding along without a care in the world ... how bloody hard is it to keep to the limit?"

  Exasperated, Nathan shook his head. “I never drive fast near schools. I have a little boy myself ! I only got clocked by cameras on my way to client meetings."

  “And where are these oh-so-important meetings of yours? On the moon? In another universe where there aren't any kids?"

  The hologram girl looked from one man to the other with frightened eyes. She raised the toy koala to her face and stroked its fur against her cheek.

  Nathan stared at Pigalle and said, “I'm sorry for your loss—believe me, I know how you feel. But I refuse to feel guilty for something I didn't do."

  “You
know how I feel?” Pigalle glanced toward Nathan's right ear, then shook his head. “What's your sentence: six months, twelve? For me, it's a lifetime! Don't spin me that bullshit—"

  A jaunty tune rang out from Nathan's jacket pocket. Automatically, he reached inside and grabbed his phone.

  “You're taking phone calls on my daughter's grave?” Pigalle raised his arm as if about to lash out.

  Nathan began to reply, then perceived that nothing he could say would mollify the man. He knew too well what awful emptiness lay behind the hollow voice, the lank mask of a face. “I'll take it somewhere else. Sorry to trouble you.” The words sounded so inadequate, he felt they might turn into dust as soon as they left his mouth.

  He hurried away. As he strode down the cemetery's gravel path—each tiny stone a black petrified tear of sorrow—he answered the phone. It was a client, of course, a client wanting action on something or other. Nathan scrawled rain-soaked notes for a task that would percolate up from the bottom of his To Do list until it became another last-minute rush job. The cellphone pumped out urgency, demanding attention like another version of the implant, as if Nathan were just a mobile motherboard for the devices driving him.

  When the client rang off, Nathan couldn't help glancing back toward the graveside. He saw Pigalle slumped over the headstone, his form so gaunt and still as to resemble an empty raincoat that some tramp might gratefully steal. The jam-jar lay on its side, yellow flowers spilling onto the grass. A translucent girl stood beside her father, trying to hug him and hold him, but her arms just kept slipping through.

  Then the motion-sensor timed out, and the hologram vanished.

  Nathan wiped his eyes, without trying to suppress the tears. He walked back to his car, grateful to escape the pounding rain. Turning up the heater, he let the dampness gently steam out of his suit.

  This is how it feels: the whole world a graveyard, everywhere you walk treading on your daughter's bones....

  He checked his watch, remembering that he had a conference call scheduled for three o'clock. His calendar pinged reminders for last-minute prep before tomorrow's meetings. And he needed to pick up Christopher after football.