Active Memory

by Dan Wells

  “Why would she . . . cut it off?” Marisa spluttered. “Why was I even there? None of this makes sense!”

  “You wanted to know the truth,” said Carlo Magno. “This is the truth. You lost your arm even before that garden—you lost your arm before you were born.”

  “You were born with a limb reduction defect in your left arm,” said Guadalupe. “Your upper arm was almost nonexistent, and your lower arm was barely half the length it was supposed to be. You had two fingers and no thumb. And even if we’d had the money to do something about it, at your age there wasn’t much anyone could do. They don’t make cybernetics for infants. So we figured we’d just wait until you were old enough for a prosthetic, and hope we could afford one once you were. Even then, though, prosthetics were not what they are today. . . .”

  Marisa had been five when she’d gotten her first bionic arm—an old SuperYu, the first of many she’d had in her life. It was barely more than a stick and a claw, the best her parents could afford, but it was a trainer arm; it had helped her to form the synaptic connections in her brain, molding the neurons while they were still developing, giving her the baseline she needed to control her later arms, including the current one, as naturally as she did. Before that first bionic, she’d had nothing. Just a stump, an inch or two below the shoulder. She’d lived with it for three years.

  Or, she supposed, for all five. Who could remember anything that young?

  “This still doesn’t make sense,” said Marisa. “Why would she cut it off? And why in her garden? And why was I in her garden to begin with?”

  “After your first year,” said Guadalupe, and then stopped. She was crying, though Marisa couldn’t tell if it was the story as a whole that made her do it, or this new specific part of it.

  Carlo Magno continued for her. “Zenaida was a scientist with ZooMorrow,” he said. “She helped them develop new genhancements, and occasionally . . . stole them. For her own use.”

  Marisa nodded. “We guessed that much. She used them on some of the enforcers.”

  “And on herself,” said Carlo Magno. “And . . .” He paused for a moment. “After your first birthday, Zenaida . . . came to speak with us. She’d helped ZooMorrow develop an experimental new genhancement that could regrow lost limbs, based on some recombinant animal DNA.”

  Marisa only nodded.

  “We didn’t know she was stealing it,” said Guadalupe. “We never would have agreed if we had. But she worked there, and she had developed it herself, and we thought it was some kind of . . . trial, I don’t know.”

  “I think maybe we knew it was illegal,” said Carlo Magno, “but we said yes, because you were our baby. You deserved a full life, and two good arms, and that’s what she offered.”

  “But why me?” asked Marisa. “How did she even know about my arm?”

  Her parents only stared at her. After a moment Guadalupe said, “She . . . saw you at church.”

  “Your arm grew well,” said Carlo Magno, before Marisa’s mother had even finished speaking. “Better than we expected. Flawlessly. After eight months your arm was a normal size, and by your second birthday you had all five fingers. It was more than we could have hoped for. She tested you every now and then, making sure it was working, and we thought our problems were over, and then . . .”

  “Then ZooMorrow found out,” Guadalupe continued. “We didn’t know until later, of course.”

  “Putting the pieces together,” said Carlo Magno, “we think the news came while you were in their estate, being tested. ZooMorrow agents attacked the genhanced enforcers, and Zenaida knew it was over. The technology in their cells—and in yours—was private property, and top secret, and if another gengineering company got hold of you it could destroy ZooMorrow’s plans, maybe their entire business. They had to protect themselves, and they did that by killing anyone who had the leaked tech. Zenaida knew her only hope was to run, and find someplace where they couldn’t trace her . . . but then there was you.”

  “You were just a child,” said Guadalupe bitterly.

  “She couldn’t just take you,” said Carlo Magno, “and she couldn’t leave you to die, so she—”

  “She cut off the genhanced arm,” said Marisa. “It was the only part of me that had ZooMorrow tech, so without it I was safe. They had no claim on me, or any reason to even know that I’d been genhanced.”

  “You were a child!” shouted Guadalupe. “She didn’t even sedate you!”

  “She didn’t have time,” said Carlo Magno.

  “She used a shovel on my baby!”

  “It was sharp,” said Carlo Magno. “The cut was clean, and she bandaged you quickly, and she got you in the car and she drove to our house. Or . . . she tried to.”

  “ZooMorrow hacked the car,” Marisa guessed. “They tried to stop her, or turn her around, so she put it into manual mode. And then she crashed.” Marisa frowned. “Omar was unharmed—the miracle baby. But Jacinto was crippled, and almost killed. Was that . . .” She couldn’t say it.

  “As far as I know, that was just the car accident,” said Carlo Magno. “She was taking the boys with her into hiding—Franca was out with a friend; Zenaida was probably planning to pick her up on her way out of town.”

  “And then she got in a crash,” said Marisa, “and Zenaida was hurt but wasn’t killed. You—” She stopped and looked at her father again. “You helped her fake her death.”

  “You should have let her die,” Guadalupe whispered.

  “I probably should have,” said Carlo Magno. “Especially now, when her damn liver, of all things, has come back to haunt me.”

  “She saved my life,” said Marisa.

  “She’s a monster,” said her mother.

  “She nearly killed you,” said Carlo Magno. “The crash was only a few blocks away—I was one of the first on the scene, and I found her on the road, thrown from the car, bleeding to death. It was . . . She told me she was running, and the couple in the other car was already dead. Faking her death was the only way for her to get away from ZooMorrow, so I pulled the dead woman from her car, and when the ambulance arrived I told them a lie about who she was.” He was crying now. “You were right there in the car, crying and terrified, and I rode with Zenaida to the hospital instead—not with her, of course, but with the dead woman, holding her hand and calling her Zenaida. I even—” He stopped, and composed himself. “When Francisco and Sergio arrived at the hospital, I explained Zenaida’s plan, and the reasons behind it. They went along with it, and confirmed my statement that the dead woman was Zenaida. Meanwhile the real Zenaida was taken to another hospital, and was treated under a false name. By the time Francisco found out which one, she’d already disappeared.”

  “So Don Francisco promised to protect us because you helped his wife escape from ZooMorrow,” said Marisa. “But he hates us because you helped her escape from him.”

  “Yes,” said Guadalupe.

  Marisa nodded, stunned by the flood of confessions. It made sense, and she’d guessed most of it already, but the real grit behind it—the really painful truths about herself, and her arm, and the sacrifice Zenaida had made to save her . . .

  “She saved my life,” said Marisa. “Maybe in the moment, if you’d known what she’d done to my arm, you would have been angry, but it’s fifteen years later. I’m fine now—you can forgive her.”

  “I can’t,” said Carlo Magno. “And I never will.”

  “It’s not like she killed me—”

  “When you have your own children you’ll understand,” said Carlo Magno. “She could have brought you to us, she could have taken you to a hospital, she could have—”

  “Any of those choices would have endangered the whole family,” said Marisa. “The hospital would have made an official report connecting me to the ZooMorrow DNA. I’d never be safe again for the rest of my life.”

  “Maybe not,” said Carlo Magno, “but at least we could have tried! We could have taken you somewhere—maybe back to Mexico. We cou
ld have gone into hiding with her!”

  “Never with her,” spat Guadalupe.

  “Why did you even help her after what she did?” asked Marisa.

  “If it happened again,” said Carlo Magno, “I don’t know if I would.”

  In that moment the lights went out, and the whole restaurant powered down. The computer went offline, the fans stopped spinning, and even the background hum of the giant refrigerator fell silent.

  “Someone’s coming,” called Sahara from the front window. “Not from the front, though—they’ve cut the power, and looks like they’re jamming wireless signals. Where’s your solar processor?”

  “The solar trees run through a unit in the back,” said Marisa, grabbing her father’s gun from the table and standing up to face the kitchen. That’s where she’d come from; the shortest path from the solar unit to here. She blinked, found her djinni was cut off from the network, and swore. She aimed at the door, ready for an attack, and spoke over her shoulder. “Well, Papi, it’s happening again. Let’s see what you do this time.”

  TWENTY

  “Give me the gun,” said Carlo Magno. He struggled to stand, but Marisa only stepped farther out of his reach.

  “Sit down,” she said, “you can barely breathe, let alone fight.”

  “Not again,” said Sahara, but her voice was slurring before she even finished the words, and by the time Marisa turned to look at her she was already slumping to the ground, rendered unconscious by a tranq dart. Ramira Bennett strode past her, gun raised, green skin bright against her dark black bodysuit. She’d come in through some other way, a window maybe, silent as a ghost. She fired another dart, past Marisa’s ear and into Guadalupe behind her. Marisa turned toward her mother with a shout, too late to warn her, then turned back to Ramira and fired the gun. The assassin dodged it easily, barely moving, and then she was right in Marisa’s face, her hands on the weapon, her horrifying mantis eyes mere inches from Marisa’s own. She grabbed Marisa’s right arm with one hand and her left wrist with another, and twisted in a sudden pattern that sent Marisa and her gun flying in different directions. Marisa hit the wall with a gasp, struggling to regain her senses; her metal arm couldn’t feel pain, exactly, but it still had sensation, and she could tell that if it had been a normal human limb, the attack would have broken her wrist.

  “Lupe!” shouted Carlo Magno.

  “I need information from both of you,” said Bennett. Her hands and feet were bare, like before. “Give it to me and she’ll live.”

  “It’s a tranquilizer,” said Marisa. “A ZooMorrow biotoxin.”

  “You are in possession of ZooMorrow’s proprietary technology,” Bennett told Carlo Magno. “Under federal statute 7o.3482, that technology will now be returned to ZooMorrow’s custody.”

  “You can’t have it,” said Carlo Magno.

  “Your demands are irrelevant,” said Bennett. “Give me the information I need and your family will be safe. I’m cutting out your liver either way.”

  “Come and get it,” said Carlo Magno, and pulled a long, sharp butcher’s knife from under the table.

  Bennett smirked. “Are you threatening me?”

  “I bet I could do a lot of damage with this thing before you took it away from me.”

  “I could tranquilize you.”

  “Then you wouldn’t get the information,” said Marisa, her anger starting to overrule her logic. “Do you want to interrogate us or attack us? Make up your mind.”

  Bennett looked at her, then back at Carlo Magno. “Tell me where Zenaida is.”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “She’s dead,” said Marisa. “She died fifteen years ago.”

  “The evidence says otherwise,” said Bennett. “She is in possession of stolen ZooMorrow technology, and as such she is a fugitive from the law.”

  Carlo Magno held the knife in front of him. “I’d give her to you in a second if I could, but I don’t know where she is. I haven’t talked to her in fifteen years.”

  “You, then,” said Bennett, turning back to Marisa. “You’ve been looking for her; I’ve seen you. You were in the shantytown building last night.”

  “Mari . . . ,” growled her father.

  “I was at Bao’s house,” she told him, and then looked back at Bennett. “I’ve been looking, but I haven’t found anything.”

  “Your mother is dying,” said Bennett. “Tranquilizers aren’t the only biotoxins I have in my arsenal.”

  Marisa looked at Guadalupe, unconscious in her chair, and thought about the acid they’d found at Omar’s house the night Bennett had raided it. It had eaten through brick and metal like they were nothing—what would that do to a human body? And what other toxins did Bennett have in her arsenal?

  “It’s a slow-acting poison,” said Bennett. “She’ll be fine for the next half hour, but after that her heart will begin to shut down, and there will be very little that I or anyone else can do to stop it.”

  Marisa felt her chest constrict. “But you have an antidote?”

  “That depends,” said Bennett.

  “I don’t know where Zenaida is,” Marisa insisted. “I know she’s near the coast.”

  “This entire city is near the coast.”

  Marisa tried to remember what Renata had said about her drone data. “She’s near a wharf or a dock or something—that’s all I know.”

  “A minute ago you swore you didn’t even know that,” said Bennett. “See how much you can remember with a little motivation?”

  “That’s everything!” shouted Marisa.

  “Then I suppose I’m done here,” said Bennett, and turned on Carlo Magno. “It’s time. Do you want to do this the easy way?”

  “You can let me live,” said Carlo Magno. He was pleading now. “This medical nuli can keep me alive until an ambulance gets here—”

  “I am not a surgeon,” said Bennett. “This procedure is going to be very imprecise.”

  “It’s attached with a plastic valve,” Carlo Magno said. “All you have to do is find it and unplug it. Just be careful, and you can take the liver without killing me.”

  “I do not have time to be careful with thieves,” said Bennett.

  “I’m not a thief,” shouted Carlo Magno. “The hospital gave it to me—I had no idea it was ZooMorrow DNA.”

  “The hospital has been dealt with,” said Bennett. “As has the bioprinter. After I deal with you and Zenaida, there will only be one loose end.”

  “Who?” said Marisa.

  “Guillermo Alcalá received a transfusion of Zenaida de Maldonado’s blood,” said Bennett. She pulled Memo’s djinni from a pouch on her waist. “A freelance surgeon purchased it from a djinni clinic and used it during the surgery when he removed this djinni. Since the djinni was in your possession, I assume you know where the owner is?”

  Carlo Magno looked at Marisa. “What is she talking about?”

  “I know where he is,” said Marisa, nodding. “Leave my father alive and I’ll tell you how to find him.”

  “I’m not here to barter,” said Bennett. “They have both stolen proprietary ZooMorrow property, and megacorp rights outweigh those of humans. Federal statute 4b.1: ‘The ability of a corporation to pursue the mandate of its shareholders shall not be infringed, by force or by law or by the intervention of private citizens.’”

  “This is madness,” Carlo Magno growled.

  “This is the world,” said Bennett simply. “Console yourself with the knowledge that you will not be in it for long.” She walked toward him, pulling a knife from a sheath on her belt, and Marisa knew that her gambit had failed. She called out the last remaining chip she had to bargain with.

  “I have videos!” she shouted. Bennett paused, the knife held high, and Marisa spoke as quickly as she could. “Zenaida planted videos in the Maldonado house computer, one of which she filmed herself, maybe in her own home or apartment. We can analyze them for data that might tell us where she is.” She looked at her father. �
�Just let him live.”

  Bennett thought for a moment, her face unreadable behind those wide mantis eyes. Finally she spoke: “So that’s what those are,” she said, and turned back to Carlo Magno. “I was infected with those videos when I infiltrated the Maldonado house computer. I’ll analyze them when I finish here.”

  “No!” shouted Marisa. She jumped in front of her father. “I won’t let you hurt him!”

  “I will hurt you both if I have to,” said Bennett.

  “Marisa,” said Carlo Magno.

  She kept her eyes on Bennett. “I’m not leaving you, Papi.”

  “The nuli can keep me alive,” he said, and there was something new in his voice this time. Resignation? Yes, she thought. But something else as well; something that reminded her, in that moment, of herself.

  A grim, fierce, unstoppable determination.

  “Papi, what are you doing?”

  She didn’t dare to take her eyes off of Bennett, but when the corporate assassin frowned and tilted her head, staring past Marisa at whatever Carlo Magno was doing, her curiosity grew. And when she heard the tape from his bandages ripping open, she couldn’t stop herself any longer. She turned her head, just enough to catch her father in her peripheral vision.

  He had pulled up his shirt, exposing his brown belly and fat white bandages, and as he tore the bandages away she saw the wide, grisly scar of his surgery, the skin puckered around the stitches, the wound still only partially healed. He should have been in a hospital, under the care of a doctor, but they couldn’t afford anything more than a slapdash surgery and Triste Chango. The scabs had stuck to the bandage, and new blood was seeping out now that he’d ripped it free. It mingled with the old, and he held the knife in a trembling hand.

  “Papi,” she whispered, “what are you doing?”

  “The funny thing is,” he said, “I think now I finally understand Zenny and her shovel. It’s terrible, but sometimes terrible is the best you can do.”

  And then she knew what he was planning.

  “Papi, no!” She lunged for him, but he was too quick. He sliced open the wound, parting stitches and scabs and flesh while a blossom of blood spilled into his lap.