Writers of the Future: 29

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Traci wipes her eyes with a harsh, angry motion.

  “We hacked you straight into the Regen list, making the system believe you were an approved regeneration in Peznowski’s circle. You’ve probably noticed by now that you are in a different body. Even the doctors at the clinic won’t know who you really are.”

  Peznowski? My fists clench at the name.

  “He’s alive,” Traci says onscreen. “And he’s on the governing board of New Haven. Calls himself Deputy Mayor Matthew Bayne. Has a whole new body, new voice, but our AI pat-match scoured his speeches and gave a ninety-one percent match with Peznowski’s cadence, word choice, and style. Peznowski is back from the dead and practically in charge of the town you’re in.”

  I stand up, naked and dripping synth-placental slime. The message scrollbar shows me there’s just seconds left to the content.

  “We need you to kill Peznowski again.”

  As if I’d needed her to say the words. I nod wearily, feeling as if my stomach has a bloated worm crawling inside it.

  “Harris, we included a subfile with your download. It has blueprints of New Haven, an injectable dom patch—”

  My jaw drops like a collapsed drawbridge. Why in the hell would I need a dom patch? Who should I inject?

  “—and a total workup of the body you’re occupying. We chose you because you’re a quick study. Memorize the info ASAP.”

  “Why?” I ask the monitor.

  Traci sighs deeply, her body shrinking. It’s as if she can hear me across time and geography.

  “The body that you’re in,” she says, “is Peznowski’s son.”

  The message ends. I delete it instantly, the blood pounding in my head. Then I slide open the pod hatch and walk naked to the shower stall, passing a row of pods and a nurse station. A gray-haired doctor intercepts me. His name registers to my nanonics eye-lens: DR. HORACE WELLINGTON.

  Wellington is an alarmingly hairy fellow, what a Neanderthal would look like if snatched from the Paleolithic and forcibly dressed into a starchy white lab coat. His eyes simmer beneath impossibly bushy eyebrows.

  “Why didn’t you ring for assistance?” he demands. “If you fell while relearning coordination, your father…”

  Would cut out your eyes? I think. I saw him do it once to a prisoner whose transgression was a “disrespectful” glance in Peznowski’s direction as he and I were walking past the line of cells. The man’s name was Clint Frederick Jamison, a captured journalist who had written an anonymous editorial against the Partisans. But nothing is anonymous anymore with patmatchers and sniffer programs combing the web like merciless spiders, feeling for treacherous vibrations. I remember Jamison’s name, because Peznowski had tortured his wife to death repeatedly over the course of forty days. Every time they brought her back, she woke up screaming. She died the same way.

  It was understandable, then, that Jamison might be apt to shoot Peznowski a glare. And for it, Peznowski had the man restrained, and personally plucked his eyes out with a staple-remover. I stood by, forced to watch, while Jamison screeched and howled in pitiable agony, and I promised myself I would delete the memory that night. But I never did. I kept it, out of respect for Jamison. Maybe, too, to add more fuel to my desire to kill the corporal with my own hands.

  Or with my teeth.

  Like my teeth in the throat of that dog.

  I realize suddenly I haven’t answered Wellington. He’s peering at me suspiciously from beneath his caterpillar-like eyebrows.

  “I’m fine,” I say, and freeze at the sound of my new voice. It’s like having a stranger speak beneath my chin.

  The doctor seizes my head, tilting it one way and another. Shines a light in my eyes, checks the pupils. I have the discomforting thought that he’s looking for the imposter beneath the skin.

  “Your father is on his way.”

  Good.

  “Good.”

  I rinse my body in the shower stalls, and use the moment to access Traci’s subfile by pressing the subdermal chip behind my ear. A lavender flower of access tabs blossoms in my eyes, and I gorge on the info train. This body’s identity is registered to a Peter J. Bayne, son of Matthew and Jessica. I wash my hair with the facility’s shampoo, prodding data bits of Peter’s life, interests and habits constructed piecemeal by Traci’s hack team.

  I’m toweling off when I complete my overview of Peter Bayne’s e-mails. There’s a fogged mirror in the stall, and I wipe it clear. A strange blond teenager looks out at me from the frame.

  The thing is, I want to dislike this kid but I find it difficult to. He is nineteen. He subscribes to multiple samurai sensoramics, especially ones where he gets to play the lone ronin helping out impoverished villages. He likes to hike. His e-mail confessions indicate he hates his father.

  The mirrored smile on my face makes me sick.

  When I emerge, dressed in Peter’s ghastly choice of neo-Victorian attire, I go straight to the waiting room and meet Matthew Bayne, the new identity of Corporal Peznowski.

  “Peter!”

  Years back, I’d read an article in Nowire about why resurrectees make certain new body choices. An unsurprising eighty-one percent select the same shell—minor alterations notwithstanding. The remaining nineteen percent purchase entirely new bodies of calculated antithesis to what they were born into. Blondes into brunettes, women into men, short into tall, racial switching…

  Corporal Peznowski has defied the stats. He’s taller, and traded his steel-gray hair for brown curls. He’s still white, and sports black-rimmed glasses stylish among the self-identified intellectuals. But the face isn’t really so different from what he wore in his last life. He’s gone from Nordic looks to a swarthy Portuguese genotype while keeping the general mix of features in eerie reminiscence of his birth face. Clever, this attempt at ducking pattern sniffers.

  “Peter!” he says again, embracing me warmly. His cologne stuffs my nose. “Let me look at you. How does it feel? All checked up, no worries?”

  “Sure.”

  He looks me over, concentrating on my eyes. The worm in my stomach flips around. There hasn’t been time to study my new identity’s speech patterns and word choices, so I’m determined to be as monosyllabic as possible. But what about the eyes? Matthew Bayne’s eyes were the same as Corporal Peznowski’s. There is no mistaking them. I had looked into those eyes too often to miss the gray, hard, glassy stare that’s part calculator and part sadist. He seemed to regard everything as if it was potential food, to be weighed, smelled and eventually cut up and devoured.

  “Come on,” he says gladly, “Mom wasn’t expecting you until next week. You were fifteenth on the waiting list, but I pulled a few strings. Let’s give her a surprise!”

  I force a smile. Endorphins flap in my chest, my movements strain in odd directions as if tugged by elastic bands. Peter’s muscle memory and hormones will be a problem. Add them to the damn list.

  Peznowski/Bayne signs the release at the reception desk, and we depart together, father and son, through a corridor smelling of disinfectant. We step outside.

  It’s the enclosed “outside” of a Martian colony. Everything is built economically crammed together, replicating the appearance of a Middle Eastern medina. The narrow street is beset on each side by a mall’s worth of shops, balcony markets, squat offices and a monorail station.

  Peznowski leads us to the monorail station. We settle into the train seats. He squeezes my arm.

  “With your birthday coming up, I was going to take us spelunking at Agatha Crossing. You still want to go? Your accident hasn’t changed your mind, has it?”

  I squint at him in the low fluorescent lighting. “My birthday? We’ve still got eight months before it’s my birthday, Dad.”

  The Matthew Bayne shell grins. “Right. Well you know me, always thinking ahead.”

  There’s no air conditioner dur
ing the ride home, but I can’t stop shivering.

  Sweetie!”

  Mom greets me in the kitchen, wearing a checkered apron and a wide ruby-lipped smile. “Let me look at you! All checked up, no worries?”

  Her eyes are gray, hard, glassy and with the flicker of cruelty. They were eyes I knew well. They were features I knew well.

  My God!

  My blood turns to cold slush, and though I tell myself to smile or say something, my body just won’t obey. The nightmarish awareness that Peznowski’s features are peering out from an attractive female face is enough to sicken me, but that’s just the ragged fringe of a deeper, almost cosmic blasphemy. According to Traci’s records, Peter Bayne was the natural offspring of my parents. Which meant that Peznowski, existing in two separate bodies, had naturally produced me. Grunting and ejaculating, the unholy union growing into a new child from the fruit of two loins of the same puppetmaster?

  I almost attack her right there. My young hands can feel the ghostly resistance of her eyes giving way beneath steely pronged fingers.

  Please…control. Please.

  “Dear?” Mom’s eyes widen in suspicion and concern.

  Please!

  My smile cracks like a fissure in ice. “Sorry, Mom. I still feel like I’m in the save center.”

  Good!

  She hugs me. I notice that Peznowski has given himself very large breasts. “Tacos tonight?”

  My mind races fluidly across reams of data, a laser flashing on Peter’s record. Is this another test? I nod noncommittally, and then notice a reddish-brown dog padding toward me from the back rooms. Doberman, muscles sliding beneath short lustrous fur. A hundred pounds, easily. It puts its head into my hands. Wet tongue and cool nose.

  “Oh! Look who missed you!”

  It’s movie-fueled nonsense that pets can detect a stranger in their owner’s shell. Pure urban legend bullshit. The Doberman’s tail wags, tongue laps my fingers. She smells the natural cologne of pheromones, body salts and skin oils. She can’t telepathically sniff out an imposter any more than she can play chess.

  Is she Peznowski also?

  The freakish thought blasts through me. I stare into the liquid black eyes for signs of my old enemy. Dog breath, eyes like black pearls. Teeth upthrust from cushions of slick pink gums, like black spearpoint ears. Like a caveman feeling out the raw Paleolithic world, I think: Dog. This is dog. Not man.

  The Doberman’s name bobs up from my illicit subfile.

  “Hey, Suzie! How are ya, girl?”

  Dinner passes like an ocean current, sweeping me along with my monstrous progenitors like a ship caught in an ocean eddy. Mom and Dad joke and tease each other, interspersing their joviality with somber reflections of my spelunking accident. Mom kisses my cheek. Dad cleans up the table, catches Mom from behind and gives a playful tickle, to which she spins around and wrestles in his grasp. They move like dancers, their motions as delicately attuned as a well-oiled machination.

  I want to throw up.

  And worse is the feeling that I’m being scrutinized. Whenever I peek up from my food, Mom or Dad or both are glinting at me. It’s Planet Peznowski, a visceral mousetrap run by the most sadistic creature I’ve ever met.

  “So how is it, coming back from the dead?”

  Mom’s question, her teeth a flash of white behind her wine glass. Dad watches me over the yellow rim of his taco.

  “Waking up in that tub was like in the movie Star Shiver, when the main guy is defrosted.”

  Mom laughs. Dad nods vigorously, biting down on his food. Inwardly, I thank Traci’s thorough research.

  Dinner ends. Sweat drips down my face like the hot splash of rain. When I finally retire to Peter Bayne’s bedroom of mock redwood, I feel ill, right down to my atoms. There’s a pilot chair in the room’s corner, and I know Traci is waiting for me to make contact through its virtual chat rooms. A holographic pair of samurai swords hangs on the wall. Guess Dad doesn’t let me have the real thing. Couldn’t make things too easy.

  I seat myself in the pilot chair, slip my fingers into the virtuboard gloves, and instantly a pinwheel of color opens in my mind as my nanonics make the uplink to the local web. Peter doesn’t have many friends; his online explorations are sharply limited in a global web that is crawling back from postwar shambles.

  I find Traci at once, in one of Peter’s few virtual hangouts—a place called SteamGuild. It looks like a submarine pen, gloomy and damp, with colossal chains and industrial wheels cranking mad configurations of gears across the wall. It takes me a minute to realize that the gears themselves are arranged into a mockery of famous ancient artwork. The Last Supper. Starry Night. The Scream. Young people mill about in steampunk clichés. Water drips from a rusted ceiling and tinkles into brackish pools.

  Traci is waiting for me, wearing a neogoth avatar with fiery vermilion hair like blood against her black corset. Huge eyes reminiscent of Old Calendar Japanese animation.

  “Peter!” she says, visibly relieved. “Welcome back from your accident!” She hesitated. “Your Dad must be happy to see you.”

  “Actually, both Mom and Dad had the exact same identical reaction! It was surprising!”

  I can see Traci gets my meaning. She looks as if she’s been tasered, and makes several stammering attempts at speech without blowing both our covers.

  Was my father monitoring this communication? The deputy mayor of New Haven would have access to spybots, and in his former life, Peznowski had been openly addicted to control. Liked to know what was happening. Hated being taken off guard.

  Traci is still trying to get her bearings. “Are you…will you still be able…”

  I cut in hastily, “I haven’t told him just how serious you and I are getting. I think I’ll bring it up tomorrow. I did have a couple of questions for you, though.”

  “What questions, Pete?”

  “If I tell Mom and Dad, do you think that will be enough? Are there other relatives of mine who should be told also?”

  She shakes her head, hair batting the sides of her face. “We would’ve… I mean, Mom and Dad should be enough.”

  “You sure?”

  Traci freezes. Her face loses all composure, as if the nerve endings behind her skin have been cut. Somewhere in Traci’s lab, a hasty conference is being held with all the people creating this youthful apparition.

  How many Peznowskis exist? How crafty is my old enemy? The nightmarish image slithers into my skull of the entire town of New Haven possessed by Peznowski clones.

  Then Traci blinks, her invisible puppeteers slipping back into the role. “Just tell your parents. Both of them. I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

  “And afterward?”

  Traci’s avatar makes a strange motion with her hand. She rubs her fingers across her palm. I recognize it from my earliest undercover training, back when I was assigned to infiltrate the Partisans.

  Erase yourself.

  Somewhere in my new head, Traci must have planted a kill switch. Always handy when behind enemy lines. I haven’t had the chance to thoroughly review my subfile, but I do a quick search now and find the kill switch icon: a tiny grim reaper.

  Too bad Clint Frederick Jamison’s wife didn’t have one implanted.

  I thank Traci and log out. Peter’s bedroom returns, and I swivel on the pilot chair, wondering what to do.

  There’s a brush of movement at my bedroom door. Suzie enters, tail wagging. Poor girl must have missed Peter.

  I scratch behind her ears, considering the problem before me. Across forty-one years, Shane’s voice enters my thoughts: The Partisans were famous for being able to sniff out a mole.

  I know I’m on borrowed time.

  The next morning Dad is gone by the time I get to the kitchen for breakfast. Mom’s at the counter, wielding two knives as if they are her hands, dexterously pinn
ing a raw venison roast and slicing it up.

  “Good morning!” Mom coos. “Breakfast is on the table!”

  I regard my breakfast plate of polenta and minced seaflower, glass of cranberry juice, and a sprig of mint.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  I nod, helping myself to the juice. When Peznowski dies, he’ll eventually be regenerated at the same center where he picked me up. What was Traci’s plan for that? Had her hack team placed other operatives, insidiously tucked away inside hijacked bodies? Were they even now combing through save files, locating and deleting the encoded remnants of the Partisans?

  Mom rubs her blades together. She lifts the diced meat into a pan.

  I finish the juice, grab some polenta and approach Mom/Peznowski from behind while she splashes tenderizer over the meat. I’ll make it clean and quick, and handle Dad when he comes home. Reflexively, I glance out the window. There, pacing amid the rows of adobe homes, was a lone man, e-cig dangling from his mouth.

  It’s Dad.

  Perplexed, I go to the window and press against the cool glass. Dad is a block away, the gloomy apartment buildings hover like gothic towers above him. He’s talking into his wrist, though by his animated movements I’m guessing he’s in full virtual conference.

  “Dad didn’t go to work today?” I ask, turning to Mom.

  She’s rinsing her knives. The kitchen looks strangely fuzzy, gray at the corners of my vision.

  “He did, dear.”

  “But…” I feel my head fogging, suddenly aware of the empty cranberry glass with ghastly implication. Panic novas in my chest, galvanizing a last desperate action. My fingers are tingling, legs turning rubbery. I leap at Mom.

  She turns me aside with ease, twisting my attack away and slamming my head into the oven. White sparks explode in my vision. I try to get to my feet but Mom is already backing out of reach. The strength leeches out from my limbs. Ceiling spins once around, like water in a drain, and before all goes black, I see Peznowski’s cruel eyes glinting out from that imposter face.