The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora) (3 page)

VELVET KOWALCYK

Do not wear fishnet stockings and a boiled wool skirt to a dank garage. Or any garage. In June.
Book of Velvet
. Chapter 47, Verse 233.

Obviously I don’t read my own book because there I was, perched on a rusty John Deere riding mower in Spike’s sweltering garage. The pits of my vintage Ramones T-shirt were sopping. And who is so damn lazy that they need a tractor to mow that postage stamp of green out there?

Anyway. Richie and Little Steven finally let Spike join the Wannabes. Their lead singer got drafted, and I suspect the boys secretly coveted this shack as a practice space.

And poor Spikey needed the practice. His voice sounded like a wounded animal’s with gravel stuck in its throat.

The song wasn’t helping. It had the emotional depth of Cheez Whiz. I could write a better song than that—if this weren’t such a waste of time. The urban/folk/metal rage-against-the-machine thing the guys were striving for wasn’t going to happen.

I so missed Winter—and Micah. My bangs were still blue, which Winter and I had done together before she went to the hospital. The darn Nomuras wouldn’t let me see her. And then Micah ended up in juvie for god knows what. And now I’m stuck listening to this crap.

Summer is going to suck.

“Velvet! Earth to Velvet.” The music had stopped, and Spike was bellowing at me instead of singing. Frankly, it was hard to tell the difference.

“What?” I growled.

“What did you think?” he asked so innocently.

Richie groaned.

“Dude, do not ask her. She’ll tell you the truth,” Little Steven said, throwing up his hands as if to deflect the shrapnel he knew was going to fly.

He was right. You ask, you’d better really want to know. You call, you’d better really want to talk. And if you ask me to hang out, you’d better have more in mind than sitting in your filthy garage.

“The words
water buffalo
come to mind,” I said flatly.

Richie and Steven stifled a laugh. Spike looked crestfallen, but he sidled over to me.

“I thought we were going to do something,” I told him as I dusted off my skirt.

“We are.” He leaned in to kiss me, but I dodged the full-on bullet.

“No,
you’re
doing something.” I flicked a pigtail over my shoulder.
I’m just watching. As usual.
“Sitting on my ass in a sweatbox doesn’t constitute doing something.” I pecked him on the cheek and made for the exit.

“It’s a nice ass,” Spike called as I ducked under the rising garage door. “Well, it is,” I heard him say to the boys.

Great. In school, I was the one with the weird clothes and blue hair. Now I’m the one with the nice ass.

Time to find something to do.
Thing is, I had no clue what that was. So I just walked.

The slap of my boots on the pavement was a hypnotic sound that drowned out my dreary poor-me thoughts. Soon I found myself outside Black Dog Architectural Reclamation and Bakery—or at least what was left of it. Micah didn’t like to let on that he lived there in the homeless village behind those concrete walls. But Winter said Black Dog Village was a really cool place.

Now, it was a burned-out hull decorated with yellow police tape. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I was glad that Micah was in juvie—and that his mom had gotten that TFC apartment—before all this happened. Still, it’s hard to believe what the news said—that they found bomb-making materials here. Micah wouldn’t knowingly live with Coalition terrorists; but I guess you never know your neighbors, even in a place like this.

“ID scan.” Two cops had come up behind me while I stared at the rubble. One tapped behind his ear.

Damn. They were checking for the new ID chips.

“We’ve still got a few weeks left in the grace period,” I stammered as I fumbled in my pocket for my mobile. They’d have to accept the old ID until then, right? Trouble was, my parents were dead set against the new ID chips that had to be implanted in your skull. The compounds had been using implants for years, but now the city was making its own special chip mandatory.

I offered one of the cops my mobile. The officer with the scanner ignored me and swiped the device by my right ear. I tensed to hear the warning go off. Instead, the scanner chimed pleasantly.

“She’s good,” he told the other cop as if I wasn’t even there. “Anne Marie Kowalcyk. Fifteen. 122 Walnut Avenue.”

“Thank you for complying, Miss.” The other cop handed back my mobile. “This new chip makes our lives so much easier.” He nodded toward the remains of Black Dog.

I stood there like a stunned mullet while the cops rode off into the sunset. I’m good? Thank you for complying?

I felt behind my ear.
What the hell?
There was a raised disc under the skin. The damn chip fairy had visited me in my sleep. Not cool.

Thou shalt not stick shit in my skull (or any other part of my body) without express written permission. Maybe not even then.
Book of Velvet
. Chapter 1, Verse 1.

Someone had some explaining to do.

AIDEN

The glossy bit of code was as smooth as glass, with no place to grab onto, no hidden doors for me to rattle open. It was a hard nugget of gorgeousity. Mom thought it would keep me busy on the flight. Her bank thought it was the next wave in encryption: security in a tiny package.

Security isn’t about code, though. It’s about trust.

With a few clicks, I logged into the bank’s database of employees and located a likely mark. Two calls, one message, and a little digital dumpster diving later, I’d convinced one of the software team members to divulge his password to the project source code. Most people trust a call from their own tech support.

And with the password, I found the key to unlock the code.

The actual key.

Information—whether it’s money, messages, code, etc.—can be encrypted with a long string of characters called a key. And most encryption needs two keys. One locks, or encrypts, the information so it can be sent securely; another unlocks, or decrypts, the stream at the other end. The longer and more random each key is, the more secure it is. Sure, you can write a program to crunch through every possible combination of characters, but that kind of brute force attack can take weeks—even months.

Humans are always the weak link in the system. There’s no security patch for us. We’re hardwired to trust. Social Engineering 101.

I’d found only the decryption key in the bank’s files, but that’s all I needed.

Still, it was way too easy. And it didn’t take my mind off what was in that book Winter had sent me, the book that was now stuffed into my backpack in the overhead bin. I didn’t dare take it out on the plane. You never knew who was flying the unfriendly skies.

The flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and made an unhappy face at my mobile. I flicked it off and shoved it into my backpack. We’d obviously come to the tray-tables-and-seats-in-their-upright-and-locked-positions part of the flight. We were on approach to Dulles.

Take-offs and landings make me a little jittery. Not for the obvious, we’re-all-going-to-die reasons. No, if we crash, we crash. Everything is everything. But with my portable electronic devices stowed properly in my luggage, I only had the stupid ads to look at as they played across the seat-screen in front of me.

Of course, it was another ad for the mobile I’d just stuffed in my pack. A young guy rocked out to his Chipster in the shower sans earbuds.
The Nomura Chipster. It speaks to you.
Tacked onto the end of the ad was an announcement for a new app.
It’ll be like having TFC right in your pocket. Take it back to school. Only on Nomura.

The family biz. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

The only way Dad would let me come home was if I interned at the company this summer. I’d played the prodigal son bit. I’d convinced him that my hacker ways were behind me, and all I wanted to do was learn the family biz and become the buttoned-down corporate prince he’d always wanted. I was amazed Dad bought it; he’s usually way sharper than that.

I hadn’t left him many options, I guess. Not after I got myself kicked out of Bern American last week. (And Switzerland wasn’t proving to be the neutral safe haven it had always been.)

The pilot announced our final descent. Landings were worse than take-offs. At least during take-offs I could study the flight attendant dynamics—who was senior, who got along with whom, who flirted with the passengers, who had a mother complex, who was schmoozable, who I could charm into a free headset or a drink. It’s all code. People. Systems. Software. During landings, though, the attendants are all business. They’re ready to get the hell off the plane. They’ve got husbands or hot dates or even just hot baths on their minds.

So that left me with too many idle processing cycles to crunch over the one piece of code I couldn’t crack: me. Can source code do more than it’s programmed to do? Can it peer down through its own layers to the assembly language and machine code underneath it? Can it change its very being? Whoa. Way too deep for business class.

I didn’t want to think about Winter yet, either.

I pulled up the in-flight programming on the console in front of me. Most of it was fluff, so I flicked on the news. There was a Coalition bombing in Atlanta. A Hamilton security firm that was indicted for “unlawful counterterrorist activities” was cleared of all charges. (The firm was, in turn, suing the newscast that accused it of misconduct.) TFC announced a new housing program for the homeless. And TFC was also continuing to give away new ID chips to help less fortunate Hamiltonians comply with the new security requirements.

The forgetting people are just overflowing with altruosity all of a sudden, aren’t they?

But the big story was some sex scandal with a congressman and a ’casts star I’d never heard of. Not that I’d heard of many.
There goes his reelection and his shot at being president
, the news reader said.

The pilot announced our final approach into Dulles. I flicked off the screen and peered out the window. The plane banked just south of Washington. I could see the white glints of the monuments, the green ribbon of the Potomac, and the flat, ugly Pentagon squatting below it like a mushroom. Beyond all that, the plane flew over houses lined up on grids and circled with fences, fanning out as far as the eye could see.

Nomura had originally wanted to build its North American headquarters in the DC ’burbs. But my great-grandfather found a more tax-(and incentive-) friendly atmosphere in Hamilton, a satellite city not too far outside the beltway, a city that would be indebted to the Nomuras in a way that the sprawling metropolis of Washington, DC, never could be.

A half-dozen banks, TFC, and several other corporate players had the same idea. Now they all act like they own the city. They do, really. I mean, if you act like you’re in charge and people go along with it, then you’re in charge. It’s all about the buy-in, the trust.

And we’re a trusting people here in the US.

Con artists like that in a mark.

WINTER

We were in a cab. The news flickered across the screen between us and the driver. The Action 5 News guy said it was a record: no Coalition bombings in Hamilton since May. The mayor attributed it to the new ID program.
Don’t forget
, news guy added,
there’s only two weeks left to get your new chip. Mayor Mignon said there’ll be zero tolerance for noncompliance.
Then there was some Nomura ad, of course.

I scratched a bump behind my ear.

Wait. May? I pulled out my mobile. It was a slim, red model that I didn’t recognize. I checked the date.

June 15. Where the hell had I been?

The cabbie let us off at the corner of Eighth and Day. My brain felt like pudding. The last thing I remembered, I told Grandfather, was working on the sculpture garden in the backyard.

Sculpture garden
? he’d asked as if he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

We pressed our way through the secret door in the back fence, through the
Sasuke
course, and through the bamboo gates into my garden.

Grandfather didn’t say a word as he took in the Pawing Man, the Flailing Arm Windmill, and the Shopping Bag Crab. Those sculptures, I remembered creating. That masked thing with the monkey wrench and the gears, though, was a complete mystery to me. It was like a stranger had invaded my garden and finished it for me.

I wanted to be that person.

How do I put that last sculpture into words? It was as if a mask had been torn away from a face, revealing the clockworks underneath. The disturbing thing was that those gears were connected to something outside of it, like the person’s brain was part of a bigger machine. It captured a feeling I knew I must have felt at one time, but it was like a memory of a memory. Like I’d seen it in a big, coffee-table book somewhere. It made me feel frenetic and serene all at once. Maybe it made me feel uncomfortable, too.

I’d started this garden to keep busy while my parents were away. Where had they gone? Something in my head whispered,
Japan
. That didn’t sound right. The voice didn’t sound like mine, either. Where have I been that I’ve missed creating these sculptures?
Hospital
, the voice whispered again.

I shook off the whisper. I didn’t remember being in the hospital. I remembered working on the Flailing Arm Windmill, waiting for Micah to come over. Or was I waiting for Grandfather to get home?

I closed my eyes and tried to remember the first time I set foot in this garden.

I could hear steps—no, running—shoes slapping in time, running in place, over this whirring sound in my head. Grandfather led me by the hand through the bamboo gate into this smooth oval of sand crisscrossed with gleaming bamboo walkways. The sand was bare, and the sun was bright overhead. He told me to be quiet, and he’d be back for me. I was scared, but I don’t remember why. I just remember the feeling—like something had been ripped away from me, or I from it. It was as if I had a big, gaping hole in the middle of me, and I just wanted to curl up and wrap myself around it, like a cocoon in the warm sun. I fought the urge for a while, listening for Grandfather or someone else to come, too scared to move. Eventually, I gave in to the feeling and fell asleep, my back pressed against the spot where the smooth walkways intersected. I dreamed of crazy, wonderful moving things growing in this garden.

Later, Grandfather gently prodded me awake.

“They’ve taken your mother and father, but you’ll be safe with me, Win-chan,” he said. “We’ll get them back.”

Taken.

I searched my brain for a memory of that word
taken
, of what had happened before I’d stepped into this garden, but it was like probing for a missing tooth with my tongue. It darted in and out of the empty space, finding only a hole where something solid should be.

The
step-whir
sound came flooding back to me then, drowning out the whispers that said
Japan
and
assignment
. The sound sped up like the wings of a hummingbird inside my head. It was an oddly comforting sound.

The hummingbird said it was all a lie.
The voices lie.

My sculptures agreed.

I searched the gazebo and found the remote on the table behind the mask thing. I pressed the power button, and the Pawing Man slapped angrily at the water until it lapped up against the Shopping Bag Crab. The Crab crawled forward haltingly, weighed down by the bag it had made its home, only to falter at the top of the sand mound and slide back to where it started, defeated. The limbs of the Flailing Arm sculpture turned around their windmill, reaching for something at the apex, only to be dragged back down and around for another fruitless try. The cloth from the—uh, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d called this one, but it looked like sails—the Sail Thing quivered in the breeze but didn’t do much else. I remembered thinking about them, about making them into some sort of solar chime.

I pressed another button on the remote. An eerie cacophony of low-fidelity sounds came from the canvas of the Sail Thing. Ringtones and other annoying electronic sounds mixed together to make my skin tingle. It wasn’t a soothing sound, but it captured a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Hummingbirds fluttered through my brain.

I needed to tinker with something.

My workshop off the garden was an old garage from back in the day before Grandfather’s car blew up. He’d never replaced the car. Bits and pieces of plastic, wood, and metal cluttered my workbench inside. Rusted pipes and a few sticks of lumber lay on the floor, pushed off to the side of the room. Richie’s backup guitar and amp rested on a side table. I guess I hadn’t gotten around to modifying them before I went to the hospital. (The hummingbirds fluttered at that word.) I know I had a bunch of old cell phones, but they seemed to have evaporated from the shelves. The ancient computer that anchored my garden network still hummed under my workbench. The Scooby Doo lunch box I’d gotten at a swap meet was still there as well.

That’s
what I’d been thinking of doing with the sail-cloth material from Grandfather’s
Sasuke
course. I was going to sew the receivers into the cloth along with some solar-power cells—none of which were on the shelves, either—and make a kind of solar-powered chime. Okay, obviously I did that part already. But I’d also planned to build a low-power transmitter to control what played on the chimes.

That’s why I bought the lunch box—to house the transmitter. I picked the box off the shelf. Technically, it was an antique, though Grandfather wouldn’t like to hear that. (He’d liked the show as a kid, and it was ancient even way back then.) Something about the box had spoken to me. The turquoise and yellow tin was shaped like an old van, with the Scooby gang stuffed into the front seat and
The Mystery Machine
painted in reddish orange on the side. I don’t know why this silly box made me smile, but it did. I pried off the lid with a little work, and I smiled even bigger.

I had built the transmitter.

Inside, an old music pod was hooked up to the transmitter. I flicked on everything and selected a song to play. “It All Falls Away” by U-238. The music shimmered out of the sails in the garden in a satisfyingly eerie way.

To my surprise, something vibrated in my pocket. I pulled out the red mobile and slid it open. The music from my sculpture exploded in my skull; it was as if I had a tiny speaker behind my right ear. I fumbled for the mobile and slid it closed. The music stopped ringing in my brain. I turned the mobile over in my hands. The words
Nomura Chipster
were scrawled across its outer shell. There was also some Kanji on the back, which probably meant it was a new model still being tested. We used to get these beta and pre-beta models all the time when Mom and Dad were home. A Nomura family perk. We were the guinea pigs for every new product.

I felt behind my ear where the sound seemed to have come from. Damn. While I was out, someone implanted a chip obviously designed to work with this stupid mobile.

Did Grandfather okay this? That was so not him.

I flipped off the transmitter and closed the Mystery Machine up tight. Why would my mobile pick up the sculpture’s low-power transmission?

The hummingbirds grew louder in my head.