Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (11 page)

"Fuck you."

"What?" He seemed genuinely surprised.

"Just tell me what you want." She felt like she was going to cry. Fari put her hand on Shona's shoulder, but she shrugged it off. "What do you want?" she repeated.

"I'm sorry," Fari said. "The phone is part of the inheritance, but it's illegal as hell. We wanted to discuss it with you."

"So? Obviously you know what you want to do."

"We want to erase it and not tell anybody," Billy said.

Eleven million books. If they were paper, how much of a bonf ire would that be?

"All right, but first I want to read
Half Magic
one more time."

They acted relieved, but of course she wasn't going to let them erase the whole library. That would have been a crime—a real crime, not a law-book crime. While Billy and Fari spent the day watching elephants and water buffalo, Shona got a stage-prop replica of the phone printed. Holding one in the palm of each hand, the only way she could tell the inert copy from the original was that the plastic was still warm from the printer. To make sure she wouldn't mix them up, she used a fingernail to nick the dummy on the back while it was still curing.

When Bill and Fari got back that evening, she made a show out of stomping the copy under her heel and dropping it in a public cycler.

She didn't get a chance to read
Half Magic
again until she got back to Bridgeport.

After she was done, she sat and stared at the book for several minutes, marveling at how it stayed there instead of going away. She flipped back and read the first page again, and it never asked her for more money for another view. The criminality of it was deliciously satisfying. It was like the joke about the Irishman and the bottle of whiskey that would refill itself as soon as it was empty.

Shona's angry reaction in the cheap hotel room in Moshi took Bill by surprise. He'd only been trying to demonstrate to her the ins and outs of one corner of the world, a little corner that he happened to know about. She acted as if it was his responsibility. He tried to put it out of his mind—his cousin was, after all, a crazy artist with a sodden cerebrum—but the episode kept nagging at him.

At work, he tried to make a case for releasing the original, unreadable version of the Kerouac book ("raw and uncut!") alongside of the vid and sense versions, but his boss ruled against him. She said it would dilute the brand.

They'd erased the note Yuen left on the phone, but the words kept going through his head.
Here's another "slingshot," in case you need one. You probably don't, in which case please forgive the impertinence.
Obviously his great-grandfather had had Bill's job in mind, and disapproval was implied. But why? He felt like the reporter in
Citizen Kane
trying to figure out what "rosebud" meant.

One morning two years later, Shona's socialnet woke her. She felt like last night must have ended with her being run over by a team of Clydesdales.

"Hello," an artif icial intelligence said when she answered the call. It had painted itself on the screen as a sexless mannequin's head. "I'm a representative of New England Regional Public Peace," the golem chirped soullessly. "I
do
hope I'm not calling too early in the morning."

Shona had had these faux-cordial conversations with the police before, but in the past the object carefully hidden outside the social wall's field of view had been a pill bottle of xylecisans, or a ziplock baggie full of Virginia tobacco. The unspoken question had been,
Who ratted me out? My dealer? That guy who bought a painting and smoked a cig with me afterward?
But that was local-police stuff. If NERPP was calling, it wasn't because she'd passed out microscopic party hats to her neurons. This time, the carefully hidden object was the phone. The question this time around:
Who ratted me out? Was it Binti, because I let her have a copy of
Half Magic
to read to her son?

Bill was washing his crawlie when Fari opened the door to the garage and stood on the steps.

"Honey," his wife asked, "did you hear that Shona got cogmodded?"

"Cogmodded?" Wow, she'd been in trouble before, but nothing that serious. "Says who?"

"Andy, her dealer."

"Dealer..."

"Art dealer."

"Oh." He wrung the washcloth out into the bucket and stood up. "I thought she was doing so well. She had that exhibition. Did she start doing..."
xylies again?

He didn't complete the sentence because of the look on Fari's face. She was leaning against the frame of the door next to where the house's eye was mounted, with her own eyes rotated to the extremes of their orbits in a comically exaggerated attempt to draw his attention to the camera.

"Want to take a walk?" she asked.

"Uh, sure."

Fari slipped on a pair of flip-flops and led Bill out into the November evening. When they passed a public peace waldo, Bill nodded and said hello, as he always did—after all, whoever was operating the big bipedal form by telepresence was a human being, and not getting paid much—but he felt now as though the pleasantry had turned into a subterfuge. They came to the little public park near their house that had barely enough space for a swing set and a climbing wall.

"All right," Fari said without lowering her voice, "here we are in the park, where we have an expectation of privacy."

They were alone in the park, but—"Honey, there's a safety eye right there by the climbing wall."

Fari sat down on the park's only bench and patted it for Bill to join her. "Yes, but that's not what matters according to the law. It's the expectation that matters. The AI monitoring that eye can't be subpoenaed easily."

"But... that doesn't make sense." He sat down, but still spoke in a low voice. "Why didn't we just stay at home? We had more of an expectation of privacy there than in a public park."

"First thing you learn in law school is that the law doesn't have to make sense. At home, the eyes are our property, so it was our choice to leave them on. The cops can pull down the house's memory pretty easily, because that's a record that we made voluntarily. Shimizu versus Missouri."

"So why not just turn them off, or erase the house's memory?"

"Because when's the last time we did that?"

"I wouldn't even know how. I'd have to access the help system."

"Exactly, which if we do it now implies something to hide, and that makes it easy to get a search warrant. Voorhis versus Todd. Not that we're totally safe here, but it's better. Plus we're domestic partners and can't be forced to testify against each other. So here's the deal, sweetie. It's not drugs. They got Shona on criminal copyvio."

"The phone. She said she was reading
Half Magic
one last time while we were out looking at animals. She must've wanted to show it to someone, same as when we were eight years old and she used to bend everyone's ear about how great it was."

"You don't get a cogmod for one book. I think she copied the whole library before she erased it from the phone."

"Oh, hell."

"We should be okay, though. Remember, we erased the memory of Yuen's house before we sold it. That means there's no record that we were involved, and it's not a Voorhis situation because it was a natural thing to do before selling."

He tried to make sense of it. "How could she copy the library? The gadget she was copying onto wouldn't let her."

"I don't know. I talked to her lawyer. Remember Elaine Kim, we were roommates in law school? I recommended her to Shona a long time ago. Elaine and I had martinis at Sancho's, and she told me all about it. Can't fault her for how she handled the case. The DA overcharged, but that kind of crap has a way of sticking. They plea-bargained to a cogmod and probation. Shona was pregnant, so they—"

"What?"

"Yeah, so they let her delay the mod until after she gave birth. The kid's in diapers now. A boy, calls him R.J. If she hadn't copped to the plea they'd have taken him away for sure. So everything's not so bad—"

"But a cogmod!"

"Could be worse."

"She probably didn't even read any of the other books. I mean, how many of those
could
one person read?"

"But here's the kicker. Shona's got to keep clean now as a condition of probation, but she called Elaine yesterday in tears, says she messed up. Hard stuff, I forget—tobacco maybe."

A young boy walked into the park and started trying handholds on the climbing wall. Fari broke off her story, went over to him, and whispered something in his ear. The kid got a wide-eyed look on his face and ran off.

"So this is the part where we get our story straight," Fari said, coming back to the bench as if nothing had happened. "We saw Yuen's paper travel journal. We were shocked, but he was dead, and that was a long time ago. We never heard about the phone in the shed, never saw it. Nice and simple, nothing complicated to remember. The phone was never tagged with the right tag, so they can't trace it to us. If Shona had told them we knew about the phone, they'd have charged us along with her."

Bill felt dizzy. The last blue was going out of the sky, as deep and sad as anything. Venus was shining above the swing set. You could always tell Venus from the stars because it was brighter, and it didn't twinkle.

"No," Bill said. After he'd said it he felt out of breath for some reason.

"What do you mean, no? No to what?"

He was still looking at the sky instead of at Fari or at the world. He tried and failed to put his thoughts together to make words.

"No to what?" she repeated. "Look, sweetie, criminal law isn't what I do, but I know the basics. This isn't
To Kill a Mockingbird.
No more than one criminal case out of a hundred goes to trial, been that way since before 9/11 and Mexico. If we let attention fall on us—"

"I mean no to everything. The whole thing. It's all messed up."

"What whole thing?"

"The whole thing of... I'm done with screwing around and not thinking. I haven't been thinking about anything. Not really. Okay, so they'll put Shona in prison, right?"

"As soon as she pees in her own toilet, they'll detect it. Or if she keeps not peeing at home for weeks, that's a common pattern and they detect it. Her probation off icer gets a ping from a network daemon that she had to accept as a condition of probation."

"And the kid, R.J., they'll, what, put him up for adoption, give him to the biofather?"

"The Y chromosome was off the rack."

Off the rack?
No way. Shona was against taking genetic material from a stranger, claimed to vote 100 percent antigene, although Bill doubted that she was even registered. A few years back she'd asked him for permission to use his Y, "just in case." He'd thought nothing of it at the time, but it was a shock now that it was a reality. Sure, it was just a Y—the boy wouldn't look like him or anything—but why hadn't she told him?

Fari was saying something about subpoenas and warrants.

"So hang on, the kid winds up with adopted parents, grows up thinking his mother's—it's like they just zero her out of the spreadsheet. No. No way, we're not throwing them under a bus."

"If she's under a bus it's because she put herself there."

"Have you talked to her?"

"No. That wouldn't be a good idea."

"I'm calling her now." Bill popped up an interface and called Shona, who picked up immediately. They greeted each other uncomfortably, and after a few seconds Fari joined the call, her face looking worried and disgruntled on the split screen that hovered above the playground's grass.

"Shona, I was thinking," Bill said. "Remember what a good time we had on that day trip to Africa? Why don't we do it again, take R.J. along? I still haven't met my nephew."

Shona looked confused. Obviously nobody remembered it as a good time after the argument at the end. "That's really nice of you to invite me, Billy, but I can't afford the transatlantic. I'm kind of broke right now." She smiled, but there was something flat about her, something off.

"Don't worry," Fari said, as if it had been her idea in the first place. "It'll be our treat."

Fari wanted to kick Bill in the shins, but there was no use trying to def lect him when he'd already gone into Dudley Do-Right mode. If she'd had to marry a man whose moral sense was stuck in the twentieth century, why couldn't the model have been one of those Bogart or Brando characters?

They checked into the same hotel, and had just finished installing Shona and R.J. in a room with a dumb toilet when Bill said, "I've got a call from New England Regional Public Peace."

Fari's stomach clenched. "Don't take it."

She went out into the hall and knocked on Shona's door. "Shona? It's Fari."

"Come in." Shona was crammed into a corner of the tiny room, breast-feeding R.J. on a rickety rattan stool.

"New England Regional Public Peace is trying to call Bill." A look of fear came over Shona's face. "Your parole order says it's okay for you to travel to East Africa, right?"

"Anywhere in the E.A.F., we checked that, remember? Just no off-planet travel." Shona's mouth started to quiver. "Oh, god, I'm sorry if I got you in trouble. It's all my fault." She started to sob.

Fari went in the bathroom and got Shona a wad of toilet paper to wipe her face with. "It's all right, just stay calm." This blubbering woman was nothing like the nervy Shona she'd known before the cogmod. The sons of bitches. There was something
dirty
about messing with a person's mind like that. She vowed to herself that she would never let them do that to her. She'd do whatever it took to stop them. Go to prison. Kill or be killed.

The horror of it gripped her. She squirmed in the hotel bed that night while Bill snored and a mosquito buzzed around the bed netting. Finally she dozed off and had a dream about seeing her own brain, pink and bloody, behind the glass at a butcher shop.

"Bill!" A bass drum was pounding in her chest. "Bill!"

"Huh?" She made him hold her. "What's the matter?"

"Baby, I want you to promise me something. Don't ever let them mess with me the way they did with Shona. Never!"