Futures Near and Far Read online

  Dr. Branson’s image materialized beside me. She sat in an invisible chair, her hair unruffled by the mountain breeze. She looked around, noticed the bodies below, and gave me that professional frown of concern she so carefully cultivated.

  “I talked to your mother an hour ago,” she said. “Your stunt didn’t impress her.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to impress her,” I said. “It was just supposed to get her attention.”

  “You’re lucky she doesn’t file a complaint with the Net. They’ve just increased the community service time for murder and other misdemeanor assault, you know.”

  “I’m real worried about it,” I quipped.

  “You’ll miss work. You’ll blow your commission and have to petition for another career.”

  “Another chance of a lifetime, thrown down the face of an Oregon mountain.” I wobbled and pretended to lose my balance. I leaned out over the gorge for several seconds, smiled demurely at Dr. Branson, and straightened up. “Why should I worry, Doc? I’ve filed a suicide petition. Pretty soon I won’t have to worry about anything. I’ll be checking out. Permanently.”

  Dr. Branson massaged her forehead. “I’ve read your case history, dear. You’ve filed suicide petitions before. You have to refile every day for thirty days running before the Net will deactivate your docs. You always run out of steam before the end.”

  I kicked her in her intangible knee. “So what? This time it’s real. I’m going all the way. You tell that to my mother.”

  She sighed. “But she knows it’s not true. You’re just waiting for her to make a fuss over you like she’s always done. I think she’s tired of that. I think she’s leaving it for you to work it out on your own.”

  “I have worked it out. In five days, I get archived. All I want is for her to acknowledge that.”

  “Why should she? It’s not her problem.”

  I blinked. Something about the matter-of-fact way Dr. Branson delivered her statement awakened my suspicions. I yelled so loudly it echoed across the gorge. “You’re telling her to ignore me, aren’t you?”

  Doc folded her palms together. She didn’t actually smile, but I felt like a victim of the Cheshire Cat anyway. “Yes. I told your mother not to speak to you until you’ve cancelled the suicide petition.”

  “Keep your nose where it belongs,” I said. “You’re supposed to be my therapist, not Monica’s. How the hell did I get reassigned to you? What are you, a journeyman, or a fucking apprentice?”

  She didn’t answer that last part. “I am your therapist, Cheryl. Why does that scare you? Why do you have to try to run back to Mommie?”

  “Cancel link,” I said. Dr. Branson’s image popped out just as she opened her mouth to utter some more bullshit.

  Mom couldn’t keep it up. I knew her better than that. A lot better than any psychologist. I’d really thought the axe would do it, but if not — well, there were other ways.

  I looked down to find Jacques, fully rebuilt, waving up at me. I waved back.

  “That was nothing!” I yelled. “Take a look at this!”

  I launched into the air. The bottom of the gorge raced up at me. On the rocks below, the coyotes licked their chops.

  Mother

  The transit pod dropped me off over on the west bank of the Willamette, in one of the old residential sections of town. I could tell just how long the neighborhood had been there because the trees and walkways still threaded among the houses in a vaguely gridlike pattern, following the courses of vanished streets. My assignment took me to a roomy old two-story Post Quake Revisionist set on a full third of an acre.

  I asked the Net to play back the job request while I inspected the house and its grounds. The resident must have had some job rating to have scored all this for himself. A programmer, maybe, or even a regional policymaker. Talk about perks. There wasn’t even a co-occupant registered.

  I wanted to tear my hair out. Here was I, a journeyman landscape architect for forty years, getting ready for my master certification, and the only housing the Net would grant me was an apartment. What I wouldn’t give for my own yard.

  I double-checked the instructions. They didn’t make any sense to me. The yard’s present motif was the ultimate in western Oregon xeriscaping. The flora and microfauna were not much different from what might have inhabited the neighborhood in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries, or whenever this part of Portland had been settled. Someone, maybe even a maestro landscaper, had gone to a great deal of effort to create an environment perfectly suited to the house, to the city, and to the climate.

  And I was supposed to change it?

  I was still staring at the existing design, brows furrowed, when the occupant emerged. “Any problems?” he asked.

  He was tall, blond, and muscular, the very epitome of maleness, yet he walked with a mincing gait. Maybe “he” was really a woman — the name on the job request was not gender-specific — but I didn’t think so. A woman who goes to the trouble of adopting a male morph usually does not use it to project female body language.

  “Actually, yes,” I said. “This says you want lots of sun, but the foliage you’ve asked for is all deep-shade stuff. Hydrangeas, rhododendrons, azaleas. Your nanogardeners are going to have to compensate every summer to keep those thriving.”

  “Isn’t that what they’re there for?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth to reply, but closed it. I could tell already that I wasn’t going to win this one. “I’ll just get started,” I said evenly.

  “Of course,” he said, as if I’d had no choice but to comply. He lingered. Oh, God. He was going to watch. I hated that.

  His grounds control box lay half-hidden under a honeysuckle vine by the side of the house. I opened up the programming port, identified myself, and set to work.

  I deconstituted the broad ash and walnut trees around the property line first, set the soil parameters for higher acidity and moisture, and assembled the new plants while the old ones dissolved. For ground cover I selected a Geary Classic strain of baby’s tears — one of those with the aqua undertones — from the maestro’s catalog of journeyman creations.

  The resident pointed to a camellia bush. “I want that over by the steps.”

  “But—” I stopped short of explaining how that positioning destroyed the front yard’s balance, but he seemed to guess what I would have said.

  “Look, if this is that hard for you, I can request a new landscaper.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said with false cheer.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ve got an errand to run. I’ll be back later for the fine-tuning.”

  A pod arrived for him and soon whisked him away. I was grateful.

  Mother Nature was going to hate me for this day’s work.

  As I labored, the high cloud cover withdrew, heralding a gorgeous afternoon. Time passed quickly. That was a rare blessing. In the two days since Cheryl had come at me with the axe, I’d spent every moment of it obsessed over her. It was good to be able to focus on something else.

  I was programming the sunscreens on a bed of primroses when a pod descended into the cradle at the end of the lane. I kept my back turned, not looking forward to another encounter with the resident.

  The footsteps behind me stopped. No voice. I looked.

  Cheryl stood there, holding a handgun.

  It was one of those ancient models with a silencer — I never remember the brand names. She must have gone to a lot of trouble to get it. I don’t know of many nanoplayers that permit creation of firearms. Perhaps she’d located an actual antique. The only time she ever showed real initiative was when she was up to no good. At least she wasn’t going to flaunt the local noise abatement ordinance.

  I ducked sideways. Too late. Three slugs tore into my chest. I fell on the tile walkway and threw up blood all over the winery harvest scene I’d just coded into the mosaic. As I tried to raise my head, I lost consciousness.

  I woke up hanging upside down f
rom a pod. Healed but disoriented, I slowly recognized the watercourse below and behind me as the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia. We were heading east at a frightening rate of speed.

  A rope held me tightly around one ankle, hemp gnawing into the skin. The acceleration and drag prevented me from reaching up to grasp it with my hands. I twisted around and saw Mount Hood expand to fill the horizon.

  “Cheryl!” I screamed at the open pod door. “Stop it, Cheryl! This isn’t going to get you anywhere!”

  Cheryl leaned out of the hatch. Wind blasted her hair to one side of her face. She waved and cupped her hand to her ear as if to say, “Sorry, Mom. Can’t hear you.”

  “Cheryl! I’ll give you five seconds to knock this off. Otherwise I’m filing a complaint!”

  I was lying. If I filed a complaint, the cops might interfere in ways Ellen Branson and I didn’t want them to. But it was the only threat I could come up with on the spur of the moment.

  Mount Hood took over the scenery. Snow turned to steam near the caldera. The pod slowed. I swung back and forth on the cord, trying desperately not to lose my lunch again, assuming the docs had put it all back in my stomach.

  The vivid orange tones of the caldera spread across the landscape below me. The pod came to a stop.

  “Oh, no. She wouldn’t,” I whispered. Sweat began to pop from every crevice of my body. “Cheryl! Don’t you do it! Don’t you dare!”

  I could finally grab the cord. I started frantically climbing hand over hand.

  Cheryl stuck her head out of the hatch of the pod, smiled, and released the cord.

  I fell through surprisingly cool air toward the sea of lava. I knew I wouldn’t just burn. I’d be vaporized. Sure enough. I landed, and that was that.

  My ethereal self manifested high above the volcano. I watched Cheryl’s pod fade toward the horizon.

  Below, my physical self had not left even a dark spot on the molten rock. With it so thoroughly eradicated, nothing hindered the death process. The Big White Light emerged from a cloud and hung there like a second sun. It drew me upward.

  The characteristic, ineffable calm of death chased away all concerns. The events of the life I was leaving rolled past me, memory upon memory, but with a peculiar distance, a detachment. I was removed from all worries, obsessions, emotional triggers.

  The Light took me away to wherever it is that dead folks go. If anything happened to me on the other side, I can’t remember it now. One instant I was rising toward the afterlife above a volcano, and in the next, I awoke in my apartment.

  Naturally, as soon as the Net had verified that I didn’t exist anywhere in the civilized universe, the nanomat in my bed had reconstituted me, using the scan it had routinely taken of me during the night.

  I raised onto my elbows, serenaded by the sound of the mat’s water reservoir refilling. Now the emotions came.

  I put my hands over my face and shook. This was worse than the axe. I curled into a fetal position — an appropriate posture, all in all, considering that I had, in a sense, been reborn. The old Monica was dead, dead, dead.

  Complete body annihilation is so rare in our culture that people forget that being shifted into a duplicate isn’t quite the seamless continuance it’s advertised to be. The body I currently inhabited didn’t exactly match the one that had been fried in the volcano. It was a copy of a me that had existed several hours earlier.

  My mental recall of my experiences was intact — those memories were part of my consciousness, carried with my ethereal self. But my new body lacked the subtle molecular alterations that my old body had undergone, and without those, I had no access to my short-term emotional memory.

  I recalled nothing of what I had felt that morning. I knew I hadn’t been pleased with the resident whose house I had landscaped, I knew I’d been scared when I’d fallen into the volcano, but now I scanned through those events as if they’d happened to some actress in a vid.

  No matter that the missing emotions were those of job frustration, fear, and anger, they’d been mine. Now they were gone, killed as permanently as my whole person would have been had I been part of my grandmother’s generation. It was only a little piece of death, compared to what Granny went through, but it brought back all the old terror of mortality with a vengeance.

  “Access Link,” I said, when I could stop trembling. “Branson, Ellen, psychologist. Priority interrupt.”

  In moments, Ellen’s disembodied voice filled the room. “I’m with a client. Hang on a sec. I’ll come to you.”

  She blinked in, saw me still lying on the nanomat, and flinched at my expression.

  “Oh, dear. A total wipe?”

  “You got it,” I said weakly.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Monica. I didn’t think she’d go that far. How in the hell did she—”

  “A volcano.”

  “Oh.” The therapist swallowed. “That would do it, I guess. This is no good. We have to shift our strategy.”

  “No more strategies,” I said. “I believe her, Ellen. She’s going to archive herself. I think I should make arrangements with her to be there.” I huddled on the bed, wishing I were smaller.

  “No. That’s exactly the wrong tactic. She’s sucked you in every other time, and it’s only perpetuated the cycle.”

  “It’s kept her alive.”

  “No,” Ellen said. “I thought we’d been through that. We’ve got a dependency here that has to be shown for what it is.”

  I stared at Ellen through blurry eyes. How could she be so clear, so sure? I’d tried, really tried over the years to make Cheryl stand on her own. But when she did something dramatic, was it wrong of me to go overboard the other way and lavish her with attention until her mood passed? She was the only child I’d ever be permitted. If there was a dependency here, it was my fault. What if it were simply too soon in her life for her to grow up?

  “What if you’re wrong?” I asked. “What if she really does archive herself?”

  She hesitated, and that really scared me. I’d never seen Ellen doubt herself. “You lose a daughter. I lose a client, and maybe my adept rating as well,” she said softly.

  “But you still think we should try?”

  She nodded slowly. “I think it’s a gamble we have to take.”

  Again the hesitation. But strangely, seeing that she was uncertain, too, pushed me past my own weakness.

  “What’s next, then?” I asked.

  Ellen paced to the far wall and back. “We can’t leave you exposed like this. We need to set up the time and place for the next confrontation. I want you to disappear for the next two days. Block the Link to incoming calls — all calls, just in case she gets one of her gonzo friends to access for her. Keep moving. Stay far away from home. But first, I want you to do some things here in the apartment. . . .”

  Daughter

  I’d waited long enough. Did she think I had forever? Early afternoon, the day before the Big Check-Out, I tried to raise Mom on the Link.

  “Access blocked,” the Link replied.

  Son of a bitch. “Where is she?” I asked the Net.

  “New Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, California. She is walking.”

  I marched out of my place and hailed a pod. I’d track her down, even if it meant sorting through all the tourists on S.F. Island.

  Before I was airborne, I had a better idea. I rerouted the vehicle to Monica’s apartment.

  I made it to her front door and pressed my thumb against the lock. If my guess were right, Mom hadn’t bothered to remove my DNA signature from the lock’s database. She was terrible about those sorts of details.

  “Monica is not at home,” the door said.

  So far so good. It wouldn’t have spoken at all if it hadn’t recognized me.

  “I need to get in.”

  “Please wait,” it said. I knew it was placing a call to Mom. I also knew the Link wouldn’t put it through. A door query was too routine to override the block. “Monica does not respond.”<
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  “She’s taking a little retreat,” I said. “She asked me to look after the apartment for a day or so.”

  This apparently satisfied the door’s guard program. It unlocked.

  I meandered through the rooms. I hadn’t been past the front room for two months, but the place was mostly the same. Other people might order their domiciles to redecorate themselves every week, but not Monica. Once in a while she’d move a wall, to create a more open feel, but she’d left things more or less alone ever since she’d moved out of the larger place we’d shared during my childhood. The Japanese rice paper scroll above the toilet had been there so long that it would have disintegrated had not the housekeeping programs restored it periodically.

  I brewed some tea and strolled onto the balcony. A hummingbird stole nectar from a trumpet vine blossom not five feet away. The bird’s ruby throat shifted momentarily to match the brassy tone of the flower — the city parks and rec department sure liked those chameleonic hummers — then the little thing rose up, perched in midair to regard me, and whizzed off so fast I couldn’t track it.

  Mom had generated the original of that trumpet vine when I was ten. What was that creator’s name? Oh, yeah. Josef Rautiainen, one of the first Finnish horticultural maestros. Her hero.

  Something about the apartment was wrong. The tea grew lukewarm while I puzzled it out.

  I was drawn into the master bedroom. Gradually, by instinct, my gaze drifted to the large montage picture frame opposite the bed. Scenes of Mom’s life filled the rectangles and ovals. I located the two portraits of her parents — one showing them in advanced middle age, just before the immortality threshold was reached; another of them restored to youth, as they looked on the day their ark left for Proxima Centauri. There were wedding shots of their parents, for whom nanotech didn’t arrive in time. My great uncle, my mom’s old friend Glorie, Monica herself at a university graduation and at tourist sites across the solar system — they were all here.

  But where was the picture of me on my first set of roller skates? And the one of her nursing me when I was two months old?