Little Deadly Things (47 page)

A battle over my inheritance had already begun. Sean Doyle, Governor Azevedo, the mayor of Boston, Congress, and an army of attorneys were seeking to pry it all away. I was too young, immature, too vulnerable to inherit property. A custodian should hold and manage my wealth until I was twenty-one.

Never mind that my education in wealth-management was more thorough than the self-appointed guardians’ knowledge. They wanted my parents’ estate and would find a way to wrest it from me. Just being in control, even for a few years, would be lucrative. And the possibility of carving up the estate for their own purposes made the prospect of a bruising fight worthwhile.

Eva’s share of the company was in dispute. The City of Boston lay claim to it as did the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and several agencies of the United States government. Sean Doyle assigned himself the ambitious task of trying to find a legal precedent by which he could appoint himself executor of Eva’s estate. Then there were the lawsuits. It would take years to probate her holdings and to settle with the millions who suffered at her hand—a legal limbo that would prove frustrating to all except to the attorneys who poured their best billable efforts into tangling and untangling Eva’s affairs.

The ersatz beneficiaries did not fail to consider that the portion of Eva’s holdings and my parents’ estate included large blocks of NMech stock. If the company failed, the value of the estates would be slashed. They had a vested interest both in keeping NMech alive and in appropriating it.

I focused on my parents’ legacy, not the estate, on their memory, not their money. I used my ghosting skills to have their bodies released from custody then slipped electronically into the pillar of a funeral home and had their remains picked up and delivered to our home. Our home? My home. Now they lay interred near the tree-lined edge of a pond where the Muddy River trailed one last streak of wildness within a great city.

I tried to meditate on their lives but I could not be still. I paced relentlessly, as if expending energy could ease the ache in my heart. Instead, I grew angrier with each step as the shock wore off and rage surged into its place, like a tidal comber filling a rocky void.

I looked through the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows and contemplated my parents’ graves—unmarked save for a spray of the healing flora my mother cherished. Soon the plants would wither and freeze in the gloomy Boston winter.

I tried to convince myself that there was a future. I imagined the view from the living room windows in the seasons to come. The earth would celebrate my parents’ sacrifice in three seasons: pastoral spring, teeming with birds, delicate flowers, and tender buds dotting the trees as if from a pointillist’s brush, a reanimated totem of hope; summer’s heavy green blanket, marked by slashes of floral color—yellow asters, orange day lilies, multi-hued clematis—an impressionist rendition of lustful nature; and fall’s crisp cool, concentrating sugars and pigments in the foliage, a harvest celebration of dappled yellow and purple and crimson, a multihued expressionist cry of mortal beauty.

It was a beautiful future, until winter, Eva’s season, an inanimate still life.

Today, spring hid. It waited to heave up through the rime. My anger would not wait. Every muscle in my body was tense. I paced and paused, looking out at the graves as if scanning for reanimation, for resurrection.

My parents died for a world that cared little for their deaths, one that tarred their sacrifice with questions of complicity, grave inquiries by solemn pundits. They were being
investigated.
Was my mother an accomplice? Had she been guilty of careless science? Did my father join Eva in death as a foe or as an ally? Why was my grandfather, a convicted terrorist on the scene? Many took that as proof of my parents’ involvement in the Great Washout.

As the enormity of what had happened became clearer to me, my tread turned heavier. I could feel my heart break with each step. I replayed my father’s final words to me, “Take care of your mother.” I remember first thinking that I had failed, then realizing that my opportunity to care for her had been stolen.

Now the survivors demanded an inquiry. No emotion but rage would suffice. I would collapse without it.

At last, I truly understood Eva.

The next several hours are still unclear to me. I remember that I screamed and sobbed, cursed God and then tried to negotiate with Him. Eventually I slept.

Sleep is the great palliative and I awoke with an appetite for food and for justice. I pored through Eva’s journals and drew three conclusions. She was brilliant; she had become a different person. And she had planned a catastrophe: gray goo.

Eva had used the puzzling phrase repeatedly in her last several entries. I invoked a heads-up display and found that in 1986, a nanotechnology pioneer considered the possibility of a nano-induced apocalypse. He envisioned trillions of self-replicating nanobots that would break down the structure of all matter on earth into what he dubbed grey goo. The vision was chilling. It was also demonstrably unfeasible. By 2004, the futurist withdrew his apocalyptic hypothesis and confessed, “I wish that I had never used the term.”

Nano-scientists considered the matter closed. Eva didn’t. Nanoapplications need not turn the earth into mush to suit the thing she had become. There were other solutions. Bind even a little of the atmosphere’s oxygen to carbon and the resulting carbon dioxide would kill us all. Develop an artificial microphage, one that attacked cell membranes like the rampaging cells that killed my mother. That would render humans into a primordial soup, while leaving the earth whole.

Her notions were farfetched, I thought. It would take decades to achieve a toxic mass of CO
₂
. She would have to protect herself from the marauding microphages. But if anyone could do it, it would have been Eva. She was a genius. Her reason had been destroyed, but not her skill.

Eva left me a second puzzle, the last entry in her journal. At first, it was incomprehensible. Her voice must have been jittery and the transcribed words were broken. I invoked an edit program and reorganized the characters into something meaningful. Her last words were in Latin: “Nemo me impune lacessit,” and then the initials, “EAP.”

I linked to the home pillar and came up with a translation and source of the Latin phrase. It was used by the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, a Scottish chivalric order created by King James VII in 1687. It is the motto of the Royal Coat of Arms of the Kingdom of Scotland. It was used by law enforcement agencies on the mourning bands commemorating a fallen officer. It is also the family motto of a murder victim in an Edgar Allen Poe short story, “A Cask of Amontillado.”

The motto’s translation was a fitting epitaph for Eva Rozen. “No one insults me with impunity” or, “Touch me not without hurt.”

Of all the things that confounded me in those days, this was the most puzzling. I could not imagine Eva reading ‘worthless stories.’ Yet she must have in order to have quoted Poe.

But that was not the end of Eva’s legacy. She left me a final gift.

It was waiting for me on my datasleeve.

___________________________________________

A PROMISE

FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO

D
r. Luminaria explained to me that anger is a normal reaction to loss. She compared anger to a life preserver. It is an emotion strong enough to keep a person from drowning in sorrow after a tragedy. Once on dry land, a healthy person discards the life preserver. But many cling to the anger as their misfortune continues to play as a current event in the unconscious. My anger would remain with me for many years and play a near-fatal role in my future.

After I disabled Cerberus, I returned to NMech, to my mother’s workspace. It was hard to see. My eyes brimmed with tears. I sank into the deep pile carpeting my mother favored—an easier surface for her diseased joints to bear. I approached her pillar and invoked a program on my sleeve. I had determined that neither her work nor Eva’s would be left behind. I alone would decide how the world was to benefit from my mother’s labor and I could not allow Eva’s notes into anyone else’s hands. Good and evil would be in my hands. Yocahu and Juricán.

I used my sleeve to relay my mother’s research to my own private pillar. I had done the same at Eva’s home. I reset both pillars to an electronic
tabula rasa.
‘Swipe and wipe’ Eva called it.

I could develop the work of the erstwhile colleagues—Eva’s weaponry, my mother’s medicines. Either would take time. I would have to immerse myself in the study of medicine and biochemistry. But I believed I had time, and I’d been trained in science by experts of no less rank than Eva Rozen and my mother.

I took a final look at the place my mother spent so many of her hours, the inviting salon that had been a second home to my father, who enjoyed the simple act of watching his wife lose herself in her work.

It was all gone.

One keepsake caught my attention—an old-fashioned photograph. It was of my great-grandmother, Abuela. I remembered my mother’s tales of Abuela’s great healing prowess. “She saved me,” my mother had said, recounting a childhood summer in the rainforest. I picked up the photo and looked at the lined face of the old woman. Was she really a shaman, a medicine woman? Was the lush green canopy behind her, El Yunque, really a place of magic? Enough wool-gathering. There would be time later for contemplation.

As I set the photograph of Abuela back on the workbench, a memory beckoned.
“Hijo. You must promise me that whatever happens, you will go to El Yunque. Promise me!”

I had not paused long enough in the last few days to respond to my mother’s demand. But the voice was insistent, and I had promised my mother. I would go to El Yunque.

___________________________________________

MEA CULPA

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 2045

S
ean Doyle was summoned by state capital security officers to appear ‘forthwith’ at Governor Mariana Azevedo’s home near the State House on Beacon Hill. Azevedo wished to avoid the press, and the Massachusetts Constitution does not provide an executive residence for the governor, although Part the Second, Chapter II, Section I, Article I, of that document invests the state executive with the title, “His Majesty.” Azevedo briefly considered reinstating the title after her election but considered the gender reference to be a demotion.

A hand at each of Doyle’s elbows guided him gently but firmly to the governor’s home, six blocks from the press room at which Doyle had been speaking. The streets were cleared of P-cabs and private cars, and they arrived in minutes.