It had been a long time since Cressida felt this out-of-place. For the past few years, she’d been wealthy, talented, attractive, popular in all the ways that mattered; she’d never had any difficulty blending in when she needed to or being seen when she wanted to be. Truthfully, she was nouveau riche—no more so than many other successful Martians; the republic was built off of Cinderella stories and far-flung peasant dreams—and when she was a child, there were nights when David struggled to put food on the table of their tiny two-room cottage. But it’d been nearly a decade since she’d found herself wanting for anything, and poverty had since become a distant memory, something only schoolyard bullies and snobbish politicians would ever think to mention. Cressida had grown from a farmer’s daughter into a Martian rose, and she never imagined falling off that pedestal, until she was one of three hundred exhausted, sweaty, terrified refugees waiting in line in the basement of a military base.
How did I even get here? she wondered for the umpteenth time, looking around at her surroundings again. She understood, instinctively, that she was nothing like these people; Mars had no royalty, but she felt like a princess among commoners. Everybody else looked scared, weary, starving to the point of desperation—and here she was, with shiny black Mary Janes and little ringlet curls framing her made-up face. Being here felt wrong. She thought, vaguely, of the clothing drives and soup kitchens she used to volunteer at for community service hours—she’d always been the one on the other side of the desk. The privileged one, the one helping. Never the one who needed other people’s charity. Not that she needed charity now—her father had sent her down here for paperwork, for processing, not to get supplies or a roof over their heads. They had that; they had money. But the fact that she was lumped in with these hungry Obscuri in the first place was enough to make Cressida uncomfortable.
No fewer than forty-five minutes passed as she waited, checking her phone intermittently and watching her social points drop. Being around Acidalia had made them skyrocket, and being around these refugees from a war-torn dystopia made them plummet. She didn’t know how the Algorithm knew that she was among the throng of new arrivals and not one of the volunteers donating their time, but somehow, it did, and her status decreased accordingly. So much for being prom queen, she thought. So much for college, so much for a career. Then, after an excruciating eon of waiting, the lady at the desk finally called her number, and she stepped forwards.
“Nomen, quaeso?” the woman asked, her voice clipped, polite.
“Latine non loquor,” Cressida replied. “Doleo.” I don’t speak Latin, sorry. She probably could have gotten by—she had been to finishing school, after all—but she didn’t want to rely on school Latin to get through this conversation; there was too much room for mistakes.
Thankfully, the woman spoke English just as well, albeit with a thick Eleutherian accent. “Name, please?”
“Cressida Marie Seren.”
Chryseis Maria Seren, the woman wrote. Of course they’d assume she meant the Greek version of the name; Eleutherians fetishized the Greco-Roman world, and ignored everything in between the classical era and the Platinum Age. “Not Chryseis Maria,” she corrected. “Cressida Marie. M-A-R-I-E, no A.”
The woman backspaced slowly. “Are you Martian?” she asked.
“Yes,” Cressida said.
“Funny. You don’t look it.”
“Well, not ethnically. My father was an immigrant.”
“And now you’re back here again? That must be a long story.”
“It is,” Cressida said, and didn’t elaborate.
The conversation that followed was short and dull, all small talk interspersed with questions. Do you need food, water, clothing, shelter, medical attention? No, no, no, no, and no. Are you a minor traveling alone? No, my father is here with me, he’s just upstairs, he’s busy. Do you have children? Are you pregnant? Cressida found that last one downright offensive, but she tried not to show it; she knew they had to ask, and Eleutherians were not nearly as reserved about such things as Martians. After a round of annoyingly gentle interrogating, the woman deemed Cressida satisfactory, and handed her a packet of papers—ID cards, signed documents, emergency numbers, a map. “I assume you already have accommodations, if your father is an advisor,” she said, “but take all of this, in case you need it. If you run into trouble, let us know. And remember, if you see something, say something. These are dangerous days.”
“Indeed,” Cressida replied, shoving the packet into her purse—her designer purse, which she suddenly felt guilty about wearing. “That’s it? I’m free to go?”
“More or less, though we are in the middle of the Atlanticus, so you wouldn’t get very far. Oh, and one more thing. Do you want a genetic check?”
“A what?”
“A genetic check. All Eleutherians are entered into the genome database when they’re created,” she explained. “That is, assuming they’re quote-unquote pedigree, so to speak—legitimate children of citizens. But even if they’re not—say, if they’re the child of a Terran emigrant—we can match up their DNA to their relatives’ DNA and connect them with their family that way. The government mostly uses the database for surveillance, eugenics, and reproductive programs, but we accessed it a while back, and we use it to reunite stranded people with their loved ones.”
“I have no other loved ones,” Cressida said. “It’s just me and my father.” Technically, for the first fifteen minutes of her life, she’d had a nuclear family, but the childbed fever took her mother quickly, before she could deliver the other baby. Her parents didn’t know they were having twins until her mother went into labor, and in the Eleutherian underground, there were no midwives. It was a recipe for disaster from the get-go. Cressida was fortunate to have survived.
“Are you sure?” the woman asked. “It’s Eleutheria. The government can do whatever it wants with your DNA—you could very well have siblings and children you don’t even know about.”
Cressida hesitated. On one hand, she didn’t know if she really wanted to have that information, but on the other, the idea of having a whole family tree she’d never discover disturbed her a lot. “What would I have to do?” she asked. “I’m not giving blood or anything.”
“We would just need a sample,” the woman said. “A cheek scraping, a few strands of hair, something like that.”
“Well, if it’s that easy, I guess I can’t say no…”
----------------------------------------
Twenty minutes later, Cressida sat on a bench beneath a false, digital window, tracing the branches of her family tree. It was exactly what she expected, and it wasn’t; her generation was empty save for her and her late, unborn sister, with no other siblings or cousins on either side. She was almost unhappy about that, although she figured it was probably for the best. Her own node, a tiny circle covered in Latin text she couldn’t read, was conspicuously empty—the spots that were normally occupied by a citizen’s name and ID number were blank, presumably because the system didn’t recognize Cressida Marie Seren as a legal name. For some reason, her mother had a number just like the soldiers, and her deceased twin didn’t have anything at all. It was interesting and kind of sad to see her whole history laid out like this, a series of circles and squares against a backdrop of plain gray, family connections reduced to sterile, pragmatic genetic lines. The dehumanizing language used in the report wasn’t lost on her, either—parents weren’t “parents,” but “donors;” people didn’t “have children,” they “bred.” Cressida had lost a mother and a sister, her father had lost a wife and a daughter, and this document didn’t care about any of that because their genes weren’t valuable and that meant their lives weren’t, either.
She sat there for a while, just reading and re-reading things. There really wasn’t much information to see; she got the impression that everything here was kept under lock-and-key, and citizens were never told more than they had to know. So she could only go back so many generations before the tablet wouldn’t let her scroll any more, and she couldn’t see much about what her family’s DNA had been used for or why. Maybe that was a blessing. Maybe she’d care less if she knew that that sort of thing was beyond her reach, so she might as well put it out of her mind and forget about it. But it was hard to stop imagining all of the possibilities, all of the relatives she might never meet, all the knowledge about herself that she’d never have. Family meant nothing to Eleutherians, but on Mars, it was vital—she’d been raised from birth to strive for the perfect nuclear household, the mother and the father and the 2.5 kids, and now her relatives were all right here in front of her, but she’d never know anything more about them. They were so close, and yet so far.
She didn’t know how long she stayed there, feeling dejected, but by the time she finally felt half-ready to return the tablet and go to bed, dusk had fallen. The base’s lights had changed from fluorescent blue-white to soft, dim yellow, and when she looked out the window, she was greeted with a darkening twilight sky. Reluctantly, she stood, fully intending to go back to her father and put the whole thing out of hr head. But as she rose from the bench, she saw a distant, familiar silhouette making its way down the corridor, and she froze.
“Hello,” Acidalia Cipher said. Her voice was smooth and silvery, effortlessly so, and Cressida felt like a complete moron when she blurted out a thick, rushed, “Salvete!” in response. It’s salve, she chided herself not even a nanosecond later—salvete was the plural form, and she was speaking to one person. And, according to Eleutherian custom, ave was the more appropriate greeting for a woman of higher status, anyway.
Acidalia smiled, though there was no happiness in her eyes. “I’m fluent in Anglican,” she said. “We can use that, if you’d be more comfortable.”
Cressida struggled for a second to come up with a Latin phrase along the lines of no, it’s okay, I don’t mind, but she couldn’t think of a way to express that, and ultimately decided that Acidalia was right and she should just stick to English. Her ineptitude at Latin had probably just cost her some social points, but she hoped that being in the Imperatrix Ceasarina’s presence would mitigate that at least a little. “Yeah, um,” she stammered after an awkward pause. “I would.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, then.” Acidalia sat down on the bench with surprising force—she didn’t sit so much as she fell, her body collapsing of its own accord. Grimacing, she glanced down at her feet, but they were still concealed by her skirts.
“Um, do you need a medic?” Cressida asked nervously.
Acidalia shook her head. “I’ll be fine. Lightworlder bones.”
“Huh,” Cressida said. “I’ve never had that problem. I guess I’m Terran enough not to.”
“Then I suppose you could say you’re more Eleutherian than the empress of Eleutheria,” Acidalia remarked. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Um…” Cressida wasn’t sure what she should say, or if she should say anything at all. Her voice, already tiny, trailed off into an aimless sentence. Then she was hit with a realization: if there was anybody on this planet who had the authority and the genome to access classified information about her family, it was the woman right in front of her.
Acidalia opened her mouth to say something, but Cressida cut her off. “Wait,” she interrupted. “Before you launch into whatever speech you’ve got planned for me, can I ask you a favor?”
“Erm, I suppose,” Acidalia said, though she looked ever-so-slightly apprehensive. Cressida didn’t care.
“Here,” she said, shoving the tablet into the Imperatrix’s hands. “The lady at the help desk gave me this. She said it’s a DNA report.”
“Of what?”
“My family, apparently. I can’t read anything on it, and half of the information is inaccessible, anyway—it’s all locked behind security measures, which I obviously can’t get around. I have no idea who I’d even ask about something like this, but I mean, you’re the Imperatrix Ceasarina. Can you help me?”
“Of course.” Mild relief washed across Acidalia’s face, like she expected Cressida to ask something more of her. But she didn’t say anything, and Cressida had no desire to press her for details. She looked down at the tablet, her brow furrowing with concentration, and searched for something for a few seconds. Then she found what she was looking for, and suddenly a flurry of data whirled around the both of them, suspended in glass-like holograms that hovered in midair.
“Woah,” Cressida said, unexpectedly impressed. Leaning back and gazing at the holographs around her, she felt like she was at a planetarium. “How did you just do that?”
“The system recognizes me,” Acidalia said. “My fingerprints, my iris, my DNA.”
“But you didn’t give it a sample or anything.”
“No, but it can sense what’s in the nuclei of my skin cells. It’d be an impressive science if it wasn’t used for such a dystopian purpose.” Leanings upwards, she traced the central holographic family tree with her finger, pausing at the bottommost circle. “This,” she said, “is you.”
Cressida had known that, but she hadn’t been able to see any of the details about herself before. Now, with Acidalia’s help, she could read all the little notes that had been written about her, all of the red flags and warnings that popped up when she was clicked. “It doesn’t show your name,” Acidalia explained, “because you were christened on Mars. Your father left with you when you were only a few days old, and you hadn’t been ‘officially’ entered into the system at that point.”
“I assume that Eleutheria doesn’t recognize Martian names?”
“Well, we do sometimes. But that requires paperwork and legal emigration. David didn’t wait to be granted a travel permit before he left—he knew that they’d never let him flee with a baby in tow, they’d have separated you from him.”
“Separated an infant from her only living parent? Is that even legal?”
“On Eleutheria, yes.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I agree.”
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Cressida wanted to get angry at Eleutheria’s awful policies, and ordinarily she’d already have a rant about Mars’s superior everything locked and loaded, but looking at her family, she found herself too fascinated to focus on much else. “What does this mean?” she asked, pointing to the words on the top of the diagram. “Is that a family name?”
“Magistrata,” Acidalia said. “Frumentarii, specifically. Your parents were secret police. See your father right there, the square above the two circles? That’s his ID number, PC-0109.”
“PC-0109,” Cressida repeated. She found it hard to imagine David Seren working as a cop, let alone a secret cop, whatever that meant. “Wonder how they got those jobs.”
“They inherited it from their parents, the same as I did,” Acidalia said. “Everything’s hereditary. Technically, you’re a Magistratum by caste as well.”
“Really? That’s bizarre.” Cressida didn’t know what sort of job she envisioned her parents holding, but she didn’t expect them to have been police. When she imagined her mother as a little girl, she thought of someone gentle and feminine and sweet—not noble, necessarily, because the Serens weren’t old-money, but certainly kind and matronly. Most Martian women were housewives, and those who weren’t tended to occupy one of a select few appropriate feminine careers—teacher, nurse, seamstress, governess, receptionist, sales clerk, typist. “Cop” was not on that list. Cressida knew she shouldn’t have been shocked—Eleutherian and Martian gender roles were quite different—but she was surprised all the same. “I didn’t know women could do that sort of thing.”
“Well, it depends,” Acidalia said. “Typically, men are military and women are civilians, more for practicality and control than anything. The civilian police force is more complicated, though. I’d have to read up on caste history to tell you the specifics, but it used to be far less militarized than it is today. I’m not sure when it became co-ed, but it was relatively recent.”
“And where do the Magistrata fall? Like, on the social ladder, I mean.”
Acidalia hesitated. “Another complicated question. Legally, they’re sort of outside the system, because they’re authorized to arrest anyone who breaks the law regardless of the criminal’s status. But socially, they’re often considered one of the middling rungs, so to speak. Somewhere between the Logos castes and the Auxillum castes, if I had to pin it down.”
“Logos castes? What are those?”
“Literati. Scientists, researchers, doctors. And the Auxillum are more or less lower-middle-class. Think of Magistratum as being a smidge below Scientia, but above, say, a typical office worker.”
“So Carina and Athena outrank me.”
“Not necessarily. People might perceive them as being above you, but technically, you wouldn’t be part of the system at all.”
“Yeah, but if people perceive you as ‘less than,’ does it really matter what the law says?”
Acidalia sighed, like she knew that sentiment all too well. “I wouldn’t trouble myself with rank at the moment,” she said. “There’s a war at hand. Nobody here cares about official caste laws, anyway.”
“I guess,” Cressida replied, though she could tell that Acidalia was just trying to make her feel better. She didn’t know if that comforted or aggravated her. “Is there anything else you could show me? Anything about my mother? Or is it all just caste stuff and paperwork?”
“I’m afraid you won’t find much about her personality or her interests here, but I can certainly take a look, if you’d like.”
“Please do.”
Acidalia nodded and tapped on the circle above Cressida. “Her name—well, I use the term ‘name’ loosely here—was PC-0231. She was in the same unit as your father, so they probably grew up together, although I suppose you’d have to ask him for specifics. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can tell you much more.”
“What are all those letters?” Cressida asked. “And the lines?” There were intermittent underlines and arrows all throughout the tree, but she had no idea what they meant. “Do they say anything?”
“Nothing important.” Acidalia glanced at one of them. “The C means ‘culled.’”
“What? Like, murdered?!”
“No. Well… sometimes. But typically it just means taken out of the gene pool.”
“So… sterilized?”
“No. I mean their DNA is literally pulled from the breeding stock and disposed of. Eleutheria creates most of its citizens in laboratories—natural conceptions are few-and-far-between, you and I being the obvious exceptions. Normally, everyone’s DNA is kept in storage, and when the government needs to create someone, they mix and match compatible genes to get the end product they’re looking for. People who have desirable traits will be used to create more offspring, and people with undesirable traits are culled, or used to make lower ranks.”
“Used to make lower ranks? God, that is so weird.” Cressida shook her head. This process made people sound like livestock, and it made her deeply uncomfortable. “So what was she ‘culled’ for? Some sort of genetic disease?”
“Um…” Acidalia read the tag. “Having multiples,” she said. “Fraternal twins and triplets often run in families, specifically through the female line.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Well, Alestra was going through her whole strict population control phase at the time. But undesirable doesn’t mean bad. Trends come and go like the wind, after all, and what’s sought after one year might be old hat by the next.” She shrugged, as if this was all normal. “It also says one of your great-times-something aunts had sickle-cell anemia, so that likely played a factor. They won’t get rid of those kinds of traits entirely, since being a carrier of the gene provides some protection against malaria, but keeping the disease at bay while reaping the benefits of carrying it is a delicate balancing act, and they probably just decided at some point that it was no longer worth it.”
“I don’t get it,” Cressida said. “If they’re this obsessed with making perfect genomes, why play this stupid game where they harvest DNA and manipulate it and change it around to suit their needs? Couldn’t they just clone people?”
“Yes, but clones have their own set of problems. Everyone has weaknesses, and if you grow a whole civilization from one genome, then everyone in that civilization will have the same weakness. The disease that takes one of them will end up taking them all. Genetic diversity is a necessity if you want your population to be healthy.”
“Wow. That’s… a lot.” Cressida was reminded, suddenly, of a project she’d done in school. Mars was an agricultural society, and she was expected to become a farmer’s wife, so she’d been taught the ins-and-outs of running a successful dairy farm, just in case she ever needed to know. She’d sketched out a whole, complicated plan for maximizing revenue and minimizing losses, and part of that plan involved breeding good cows to good steers and bad cows to beef, and sending especially bad cows to the slaughterhouse. It hadn’t bothered her then, because they were talking about bovines who had no comprehension of family or motherhood. But when the cows were replaced with real, human people, it became wildly disconcerting. “For the record,” she added, “I hate this.”
“As you should,” Acidalia sighed. “Oh, I should show you my family tree sometime—well, not mine per se, because half of mine is blank, but my mother’s. Go far enough back and it begins to look more like a family wreath. The entire Cipher dynasty is a mess genetically.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how royalty always is. They like keeping it in the blood, I guess.” Cressida shook her head. “Wait, what do you mean half of yours is blank? Shouldn’t there be some record of your father?”
“I have no idea who my father is,” Acidalia said plainly.
“What?”
“He was Martian—not the child of an Eleutherian immigrant, I mean fully Martian. And, of course, Mars doesn’t keep genetic records on their citizens the way Eleutheria does, so I have no way of looking him up. I always assumed he was one of my mother’s many paramours—empresses and emperors have always loved their concubines.”
“Alestra has concubines?”
Acidalia laughed. “Had, once. Perhaps she still does. But I doubt she’ll be making any more bastard children any time soon. My brother and I are enough, and besides, it was never about love for her—it was always about control.”
Acidalia used the present-tense, Cressida noticed, as if T had never died. But she was too polite to comment on that, and she didn’t really care anyway. “Wait a second,” she said. “So you are a bastard? It’s not propaganda? How does that work on a planet with no marriage?”
“Legitimacy is different, here. On Mars, legitimate children are born from legitimately married parents. Assuming your father married your mother at some point before your conception—“
“Which he obviously did,” Cressida interrupted, defensive.
“Right,” Acidalia continued. “Since you are the product of a legitimate union, you are legitimate on Mars, and that’s legally binding—you are and always will be entitled to your father’s estate when he passes, and you enjoy all the rights of a citizen. On Eleutheria, it doesn’t work like that—families ties plainly don’t exist in many castes and districts, which makes the whole matter of inheritance rather moot, and parents don’t really have custody of their children, everyone belongs to the state. Consequently, there is no legal definition of legitimacy or illegitimacy. But there is a stigma surrounding natural conceptions and births, especially between members of different castes—your parents were both Magistratum, so you’re a Magistrata, too, but what if your father was a Magistrata and your mother was a Negotia? Or a Labora? What would your status be? Suddenly, there’s this child who exists between two castes and whose existence was not authorized by the government, and that’s a logistical nightmare.”
“But it’s not a legal term,” Cressida echoed. “So why do people want Aleskynn on the throne so bad? You’re a bastard, but you’re entitled to it.”
“Aside from the standard political reasons? Aleskynn is a pedigree show dog, and I am a mutt.” She shrugged. “I’m different. I look different, I act different, my bones are different. I’m a Martian and a Cipher, and in the aristocracy’s collective mind, those traits cannot coexist. So I technically have every right to inherit the throne, but in practice, it’s not hard to see why they believe my fully-Terran, fully-Cipher sister has more of a claim than I do. Either way, it doesn’t matter.”
Cressida raised an eyebrow. “How does it not matter?”
“Because, regardless of whether I can claim the crown or not, I have no innate authority,” she said. “None of the Ciphers do. Alestra has no right to rule the way she does. No one elected her or granted her power. She was just fortunate enough to have been born to the Imperatrix Harmonia, who was in turn fortunate enough to have been born to the Imperatrix Euphemia, who was born to Jocasta, who was born to Meridiana, who was born to Cincinnata…” She trailed off. “You get my point. Power doesn’t come from a crown or a throne or a palace in the Imperial District. And if the people hate my mother, she has no right to rule over them.”
“And you do?”
“As long as they want me.” Acidalia looked distant, pensive, for a few seconds, and Cressida felt awkward in the sudden quietude. Then Acidalia said, “I’m sorry. We’ve strayed very off topic.”
“Yeah,” Cressida said, “um. What was it you wanted to talk to me about, again?”
----------------------------------------
By the time Cressida got back to the Serens’ temporary on-base home, it was early night, and she was staring to feel exhausted. Everything Acidalia had just said swirled frantically in her mind—aliens, space travel, a whole mess of intra-galactic politics—but she was too tired and overwhelmed to make any sense of it, and as she pulled open the door, she resolved to just put it out of her head until morning. Her father, of course, was still up, still poring over documents, and she wanted to be angry at him, but she didn’t have the energy. She was going to accompany a bastard Eleutherian princess to diplomatic affairs in outer space, and processing that was an effort in and of itself.
“Hey,” David said as she padded by, trying to make herself look annoyed. “What took so long?”
“Her royal majesty caught me while I was down there. She gave me this whole debrief about the situation. So I guess we’re going to outer space now?”
“You don’t have to come.”
“Well, I’m not letting you go alone.”
“You’re my kid, Cressa. It’s not your job to take care of your old man,” David said. “Really, no one would be offended if you wanted to stay here.”
She shook her head. “What I want is to go back to Mars. But if my options are the Imperatrix Ceasarina’s personal spacecraft or this concrete hell, I’m choosing the former.”
“I guess that’s valid.” David stood and gathered his collection of papers. “What did they give you down there?”
“Nothing much. A map, a bunch of documents. They just want to keep track of who’s on base, I think. Oh, and the lady did some kind of DNA test thing, but it didn’t turn up anything we didn’t already know.”
David knitted his eyebrows. “Did they give you a printout?”
“Yeah. Um, hold on.” She set her belongings down and sifted through them, searching for the diagram. When she found it, she handed it over, although she couldn’t fathom why he would want to see it. He didn’t talk about his deceased wife and daughter very often, and he liked to avoid reminders of them when he could help it.
“Wow,” he said, looking down at the family tree. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many details on one of these before. Who had the clearance to access all of this?”
“Acidalia.”
“Ah. That explains it.” Just as Cressida had done, he traced the lines and arrows with his fingers, connecting himself to his wife and children. “Culled,” he read, “gemini. I suppose I expected that. And me, look at this—‘rebellious behavior.’ I guess they didn’t like the fact that I took you and ran, huh?”
“It’s a totalitarian dictatorship that wants nothing if not total control over its citizens. Of course it wouldn’t like that.” Cressida shook her head. “Listen, I think I’m just going to go to bed. I looked at the whole report, and there’s nothing significant on there—just weird, disturbing details about this nightmare planet’s dystopian breeding programs. It’s like Brave New World, but creepier.”
“You sure? There’s a lot of stuff here. Don’t you want to see the government’s reports on your old man? Look, it says here that I was disciplined once for improperly buttoning my mess dress uniform when I was 8, and again for being late to a military parade when I was 13.”
“The fact that that sort of thing is permanently kept in your government file is nuts.”
“Like you said, it’s a totalitarian dictatorship,” he laughed. “And look at this. Your mother was always bolder than me—when we were sixteen years old, she flipped off a commanding officer because he made some comment about her hair. Her list of transgressions is about a mile long. Fistfights, violence, insubordination… God, I miss her. She was so much like you.”
“Like me?” Cressida didn’t know if that comparison was sweet or offensive. Perhaps her father, blinded by nostalgia, was looking at her through rose-colored glasses, trying to find a memory of his late wife in her. Or maybe he thought for some reason that she was the type of girl who started fistfights for fun.
“Yes,” David said. “Because she was strong-willed and stubborn, and she recognized a broken system when she saw one.”
“I guess,” Cressida said. “But complaining about Eleutheria is a far cry from staring fistfights.”
“Fistfights? She started riots,” he laughed. “She figured out, once, that if you paint a circle of do-not-enter signs around a self-driving car, you can trap it because it’s programming won’t let it move. She was constantly dragging me to protests and sit-ins—that doesn’t sound like much, but this is Eleutheria we’re talking about, it’s a wonder we survived as long as we did. I think she always knew she’d die young, but she had such big ambitions.”
“And childbed fever was the thing that did her in?” Cressida asked. “That’s some sick irony.”
David swallowed. “Yeah. Well—“ He looked like he was about to say something, but he was cut off suddenly by a loud, obnoxious alarm blaring from his metadit, Panicking, he scrambled to answer it, but there was no caller ID—just a blank, empty screen. As he raised it to his eyes, a short message appeared:
I don’t know who the fuck you think you are or what you aim to achieve, but you’ll get out of here immediately if you know what’s good for you. This is not your business. PC-0231 is dead. Let her rest.
Theodora Seren.
Cressida jumped in surprise, then turned to stare at her father. David’s face was white and stony. “Who the hell is Theodora?” she demanded, sounding more nervous than she intended. “And how does she know someone’s looking at her?”
“I don’t know a Theodora,” David said sharply. “You should go to bed.”
“How can I go to bed after—?”
“This person might be dangerous. Whoever she is, she has eyes on the Revolution’s computer systems, possibly the whole planet’s genetic database. That’s a problem. I have to go report this, and I don’t want you getting mixed up in it.” He shot her an apologetic look, then picked up the metadit and strode towards the door. “Stay put. Avoid electronics, and don’t move until I get back.”
With that, he was gone, and Cressida was left standing alone in the living room, the familial nostalgia she once felt giving way to a sick sense of dread.