Chapter 39: Compiled Memories

Delilah Vyskocil, my mother and chief architect of FUTUR Design’s defenses, ran a department that occupied an entire floor of the tower. The twisting outer skin of the building contained a long, narrow curving window through which one could see some great distance into the industrial wasteland between the NCD and the outer ring of vertical farms and subordinate financial districts.

Along the inner wall were oblong pits. Inside each one an engineer reclined, jacked in to netspace. Mom and I walked along the floor, above workers who could neither see nor hear us. Only their supervisors, sitting at tables within their own pits, occasionally looked up at us.

At the far end of the department was her office, a big but cozy room, almost like a family room, containing a couch and a bookshelf with old editions, a sideboard with a coffee maker and fresh fruit, and a desk flanked by tall lamps flickering with artificial violet firelight. She took a seat behind her desk and gestured for me to sit in one of the winged, plush chairs facing it.

All this without a word. I felt like it was up to me to get things started.

“Missed you, growing up,” I said, trying to sound offhand.

“Don’t start like that,” she said.

“Dad missed you, too.”

“That man is consumed by a paralyzing fear of the flood. Did you know that? The world is warming. He can't stop that. The trick is not to survive but to thrive. Your father lacks imagination and ambition.”

“But not love.”

“When was the last time you called him?” she said.

“Ouch,” I said with as much disdain as I could put into it. But what she said got me right in the heart.

Aside from a few anonymous infusions of money into his account, I hadn’t been in contact with my father since leaving home. Maybe I had been hoping to have something to report to him. Hey Dad, I found Freya, and she’s doing great. Hey Dad, I found my people, and they’re teaching me so much. Hey Dad, my best friend turned out to be a robot and my new friends are either in prison or won’t talk to me.

I realized I had brought my hand up to my mouth. Lost in my feelings, I didn’t even notice until now that my mother was looking at me. Her expression was hard to read. It wasn’t uncaring. But it was also defensive. I could smell something in the air of the office, something clean, ionized, chemical, like an artificial violet scent. Was this how she lived her life? Scented, super-clean, with everything in order?

“You know by now that I took this job to save you,” she said. “If I weren’t here you may not be alive. You certainly wouldn’t have your eyesight.”

“Among other kinds of sight.”

She leaned forward. “That is a gift,” she said, giving her last word a cutting edge.

“And a way to keep track of me.”

She threw up her hands. “Like everything else in this world. Tell me one system that doesn’t record your identity or location.”

I drummed my fingers on my knee. I couldn’t look at her. “I can think of a few,” I said.

“All illegal,” she said.

“You’re not wrong,” I said, looking through the interior window at the glowing core of the atrium.

She followed my eyes.

“Our largest processor and our connection to the Root,” she said. “If you're looking for a physical representation of how much every corp knows about you, that’s it.”

I gazed at the shifting patterns in the luminous core, now gold, now purple, now rosy bronze.

My mother put her face in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is not how I wanted to begin. This is not how a mother should act.”

I reached my hand toward her, palm up, in a gesture that I hoped communicated sympathy. “You’re not much of a mother.”

“Not to you,” she said. Her voice sounded both bitter and matter-of-fact. It must have cost her something to say that. I felt for her.

“Were you a good mother to someone else?” I said. Just saying it made me feel jealous and afraid. But I also hoped that she was OK, my mother. I didn’t hate her.

“I’m mother to a great many simulants,” she said. “They even call me mother.” She leaned back in her chair as holographic projections rose from her desk. I saw Ludo playing with his blocks, Marlowe searching for evidence of intrusion, Starbuck sailing the labyrinthine digital sea, harpoon at the ready, and Freya in battle mode, ruby-red armor partially covered by flaming hair.

“Freya,” I said.

She leaned forward to wave away all the holograms except for Freya’s. To it she added other images of her, as a girl picking flowers, as a young woman in a cloak, tending the hearth, and as a real person, growing up in Canton, then living at 843 Gin Street, cracking corporate servers in secret in plywood-lined crash spaces between shifts at FUTUR Design.

“My greatest project,” my mother said.

“There’s something I don’t understand. My memories of you before you left are fuzzy, and might be influenced by what Dad told me, but I know that I only met Freya after you were gone. If she was a simulant while I was growing up with her, that means you planted her with me after you left.”

Something flickered behind my mother, as if something came between the window and the sun outside. Then it was gone. My mother leaned back again and looked at the ceiling. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

The possibility that my mother had left but had made sure that I would have a companion suddenly filled me with gratitude. I had not made the connection before but I felt instantly like it was possible. It made me feel something like love for my mother.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

But I was also angry and hurt, and I didn’t know if I would ever stop being angry and hurt. Even so, I could recognize this gesture as something that she had done for me. She was looking out for me.

Maybe, now that Freya knew where she came from, she and I could even be friends again.

Maybe my mother could even make it happen. Of course there would be compromises. I’d have to stop running. That wasn’t hard. The runners didn’t want me around anyway.

My eyes were watering. “Is it true?” I said.

“What do you think?” she said.

Something in the way that she said it made me hesitate. I wanted so much for it to be true that my mother had made sure I would never be lonely by giving me a best friend. Even if my best friend had been grown from birth to be a best-in-class information countermeasure electronic system.

“I hope it’s true,” I said.

“You can be with her again,” she said. “Freya has rejoined the fold. She works in Niflheim. She could be transferred here. You have a job here, too, if you want. Your modifications, your experience, and your natural ability would all be useful to us. You could be the protector you have always wanted to be. You could protect Freya, and me.”

She made a complicated gesture at a sensor panel on the surface of her desk and the wall next to us began to move. There, behind it, was another office, smaller than my mother’s, with a smaller bookshelf and a coffee maker and a desk.

“This could be your office,” she said.

“You’re offering me a job?” I said to my mother.

She walked over to the small, dim room that she had said could be my office. “I’m offering you a life.”

I must have snorted.

She gave me a sharp look. “You’re broke, you’re on the run, you have no friends left. Let me give you security. Let me give you a future.”

“Don’t try to mother me now,” I said.

She only laughed. “Come on. If you want to hurt my feelings, you can do better than that.” But the tightness in her voice suggested to me that I had hurt her feelings.

She turned her back to me and walked through the small room. I saw that there was a cherrywood shelf mounted to the wall, featuring framed prints of the mountains outside Canton, Hungry Creek, the old mill that Freya had once climbed, and the waterfall. It was a little room she had set up just for me.

My heart missed a beat. Suddenly I saw her not as a top FUTUR Design executive but as a middle-aged woman who worked impossible hours, who exercised rigorously to keep herself in the kind of fighting trim that the corporate world demanded, but she was lonely and she had created a nest to which her lost son could return.

Could I do this? Work here?

There were advantages. I could keep Freya safe. Perhaps I could free Enrique. I wouldn’t have to worry about being hunted by the law or by the corps. I wouldn’t be worried about further neurological trauma, about flatling against a monster piece of illicit ice. It wasn’t like the runners of Carthage wanted me anymore. What would I be giving up, really?

I saw that my mother was looking at me. “Your other friend went to work for 7Wonders.”

“You’re talking about Linney.”

“We know her as nonlineardynamics. She’s doing well for herself.” My mother gestured at her desk and a hologram came up.

It showed Linney’s personnel file. In the month, give or take, that she’d been with a 7Wonders subsidiary, she’d been promoted. Her salary was unbelievable. The security she must feel tantalized me. A stray thought flitted through my mind: if I had a corporate career, perhaps Linney and I could even be together. Would she and Freya like each other?

My eyes snapped back to my mother’s. It was clear that she was trying to assess my feelings. She didn’t know me as a person but she knew how to get a response from me. How could she do that?

“I’m just like my father, aren’t I?” I said, suddenly missing him, suddenly feeling guilty about not calling him. “I just want to look out for my people.”

She shrugged in a way that felt like she was agreeing with me.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said.

“Do you want to know who is hunting you right now?”

She walked away from her desk toward a glass panel in the wall, concealed behind a curtain. She touched the panel with her hand and brought out a tablet from the thick metal box within the wall. “It was a nice trick, lifting my tablet earlier,” she said. “That’s when you came to my attention. I’d been following your eyes from time to time, but when you showed up here with Gloss, I understood the kind of people you were getting involved with.”

She handed me the tablet from the wall vault. The display showed a bewildering array of information. My conscious mind couldn’t make sense of it, but then I felt my eyes focus in on certain areas while the sub-subs in my fingertips moved the display around the data.

If I needed any justification for being paranoid for the rest of my life, here it was.

FUTUR Design had deployed a network of unwitting informants throughout Carthage, consisting of everyone implanted with any of a range of FUTUR Design sensory-boosting devices, from hearing aids to artificial eyes to bone modems. These informants—or rather, their implanted devices—were looking for any trace of me, ready to report back to the security division, where that report would initiate an response from one of approximately sixty private security contractors that FUTUR Design was working with. They had orders not to kill me but to bring me into protective custody. Apparently, when Sunya Xiong had checked, they were nowhere near locating me.

White Tree was also looking for me, tracking me through the traces of DNA that we all left here and there as we moved about our daily life, shedding dead skin and hairs and exhaling and perspiring. They had dispatched roving digital killers. Every time I jacked in I risked being assassinated. But they hadn’t found me yet, either.

Even 7Wonders knew who I was thanks to my exploit with Linney at Restoration Consulting. I didn’t rate any special countermeasures on their part.

Finally, FUTUR Design was contracting with Panopt to prepare derisive news coverage featuring me, ready to splash onto eyeballs across Carthage the moment I was vulnerable.

I handed the tablet back to my mother. “Impressive,” I said.

“It can all go away,” she said, taking a seat behind her desk again. “Just say the word and you’ll live in comfort and security for the next thirty years.”

“As long as I devote every hour, every thought, to the well-being of FUTUR Design, right?”

She spread her hands. “That, as everyone knows, is the deal for those lucky enough to be offered an indenture.”

“How many years left on yours, Mom?”

“Thirteen, but I’ll renew. I love my work. I think you would, too.”

The holograms on her desk went back to showing Freya, in netspace and meat, at all ages. She sifted through the images, emphasizing some and shrinking others. “You could work with her,” my mother said. “You could become friends. Simulants might not be human but they are people. I think you knew that.”

We watched the images of warrior goddess Freya standing before a server and traumatized young adult Freya at her cubicle at work. I thought about Freya, straight from the pools at White Tree, allowing the Prophet Ezra to encode her memories on a wafer of fungal memory.

“Why do you say ‘become friends?’”

My mother cocked her head but her eyes were still on the images of Freya. “Because now that you know the truth about her, you can carry on a friendship on a foundation of trust and love.”

“When was she awakened?”

“You know the answer to that.”

I thought about the filenames listing Freya’s memories. Suddenly the answer came to me.

“It wasn’t seventeen years ago.”

“It wasn’t?” Suddenly I had my mother’s full attention.

“No,” I said. “She was awakened recently with implanted memories. The Freya I worked with in Chicago is a simulant. But there’s another Freya out there. The original.”

I knew I was right.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

FUTUR OPal

Manufacturer

FUTUR Design

Cost to rez

Low

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

Varies

Type

Puzzle

Subtype

Collaborative

Subroutines

Stops runs; incresaes in complexity the more copies are on the same local network