Rachel and Dorian Burkes, all that remained of their broken family, waited outside the seedy little door, eyes scanning the street and fingers twitching in fear. This wasn’t the part of town they were used to, although where they lived didn’t look much better. The gutters overflowing with trash, the flickering streetlights above; it wasn’t their hovel, which made it alien and dangerous. At least where they lived, they knew which gangs to prostrate themselves before. Here, on the lower-East-side, they had no idea.
They heard movement behind the small door, sluggish stumbling, and Dorian hammered the cracked, plastic buzzer a couple more times for good measure. It wouldn’t be a great end to the day to get mugged while they were waiting to be let in.
“Keep ‘yer pants on, I’m comin’,” a voice from the other side of the door shouted, and the accent was so unlike what either one of them expected that they shared a fearful look. What if they’d chosen wrong. What if he couldn’t do it? What if they’d wasted all of their money on a hope and a dream?
A yelp and a crash, then the door slid to the side. It stuck halfway open, just for a moment, before a motor whined and the door shunted the rest of the way into the wall. The man on the other side was in a dirty wifebeater with dark sweatstains down the chest and below the arms, and a pair of sweatpants that Dorian wasn’t sure had been that shade of brown when they were new.
“Yah? What d’ya want?”
Rachel was the one who noticed the 10mm pistol held half-concealed in his hand against the doorframe. Her confidence flagged for an instant, but she pictured light brown curly hair and steeled herself.
“Mr… Fiberhopper?”
“You with the Dogz? ‘Cause their money ain’t due yet.”
“No, I’m… we’re…”
“We’re the Burkes,” Dorian cut in. “We paid you… to…”
“Ah yah, I ‘member. Little kid. Come on in.”
Fiberhopper stepped back over a bag of trash that was leaking something foul and brown onto the bag just underneath it. The inside of the apartment smelled like stim pods and tobacco, and Dorian’s heart sank with regret. They’d made a huge mistake, but there was no getting their money back now.
Past the entryway was a small room with marginally fewer trash bags littering the floor. Here was the stim popper in question and a pile of used cartridges, right next to a deck and headset combo. It looked like Fiberhopper sat either on the floor, or on a particularly lumpy cardboard box when he used the deck, because there was no proper chair that they could see.
“Make yerselves comfortable. Or don’t, I suppose ye won’t be here for long. To be honest, I weren’t expectin’ ye for a while yet.”
“We got your message,” Rachel pleaded. “You said it was time.”
“Aye, I did. Thirty minutes ago. What’d ye do, run over?” In fact, they’d chartered the first cab they could grab as soon as Dorian’s deck pinged with the message.
“Something like that,” he said. “So… how’s this supposed to work? Are you going to do the hack here? Do we… watch?”
“What? No, this ain’t a movie. I messaged ye when I was done, and I’m done. Here it is.”
Fiberhopper picked up a storage card from a pile on the counter. How the man knew it was theirs, Dorian had no idea. In fact, he had more than a little suspicion that it was just a random storage card the man happened to lay his fingers on. But if he was cheating them, there wasn’t anything they could do about it. Especially with him hauling that 10mm around.
Rachel started forward, but when Fiberhopper pulled back, her hands went to her mouth and she gasped. Was he toying with them?
“I jus’ wanna make sure. You know wha’ this means, yah? He’ll never be able to grow up. He needs a real body t’do that. Brains, hormones, all that jazz.”
A real body that would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars to have printed. A hundred thousand dollars that they’d never make in their lifetimes. Most people would move on, would let their plans expire and the digital snapshots be deleted and just have another kid. But not them. Not for Benny.
For twenty thousand—their entire savings and half of their furniture—they’d bought a powerful deck, a pair of headsets, and a single job from a low-tier hacker; Fiberhopper. He’d said he could break into the backup systems, that he could get a copy of Benny’s brain scan, and if he was to be believed, he was currently rubbing his grubby fingers all over it.
“We know,” Dorian said, and ground his teeth. “We know.”
Fiberhopper shrugged and held the card out again. Rachel stepped forward and took the thin piece of plastic and circuitry that might or might not have held the suspended consciousness of their baby boy. She stepped quickly back and Dorian put a hand on her shoulder.
“Job’s done, far as I’m concerned.”
“That’s it?” Dorian asked.
“That’s it. Now shoo, I’ve got work t’do.”
Rachel held the storage card with both hands the entire ride home. For a tense twenty minutes they’d waited on the street corner, sure that someone would arrive and mug them, stealing more than just their scant remaining money, but no one came. Either the neighborhood was really abandoned, or the real thugs hadn’t yet come out to play.
The cab driver had been skittish, scanning the street as they got in and eyeing them through the bulletproof glass, but they slammed the door, Dorian barked an address, and the car started away. Rachel began whispering to the card.
“Mommy and Daddy are here now. Everything’s going to be okay.”
The cab dropped them off in an equally seedy neighborhood, but one they were familiar with, and sped away at top speed. Their apartment was on the sixth floor, but the smile on Rachel’s face and in Dorian’s secret heart made them feel like they were riding in an elevator instead of climbing the stairs. They might as well have been flying on clouds.
Their apartment door was nothing spectacular, just another fiberboard panel like the ones beside it. No one would expect that the dingy room probably contained the most powerful computer system in the entire building. Dorian rushed to the closet, carefully extracting the deck and headsets from under the pile of clothes they used for cover, and set it up on the dining table, one of three pieces of furniture that remained.
Finally, it was ready. The two headsets snaked out from the deck, which even idle gave off a faint blast of heat from its cooling fans. Dorian was sure they were going to pay for their electricity through the nose, but it would all be worth it.
If. If he was really there. If they hadn’t been scammed.
Rachel reached forward with their son’s card toward the port.
“Wait,” Dorian said, and she looked up. Her eyes were as big as saucers and he could see they were already overflowed with tears, threatening to spill over.
“I was just thinking, if the scan is from right before…”
“He’s going to be scared,” Rachel finished.
Dorian nodded.
“You should go in first. Be there when I load him in.”
Rachel nodded and passed the card to her husband as if it were a sacred artifact. She picked up the transcranial headset and placed the nodes on her temples, wrapping the electrode band around the sheet of straight brown hair at the back of her head. She closed her eyes and sat stock still, and Dorian knew she was already in the simulation. Waiting.
He looked at the small card that hopefully held their son’s last thoughts and feelings before the fever took him. It was part of the admission process at the hospital, and that night he’d felt like it was burning time they didn’t have, when all their son needed was to be stabilized. Now, he was happy the hospital had forced the scan, but still infuriated at how they’d been jabbed with that impossible re-body price. In the night when he couldn’t sleep, sweating under the thin sheet beside Rachel, sometimes he wondered if they let kids die just to pump the parents.
Benny would never have a childhood, not until they could scrape together enough money to buy a body. And even then, it wouldn’t be official. Real. They could never afford it, not a printed replica of the one he had. It would be pirated, just like his consciousness, which would have to be sideloaded in. But the alternative was worse, so much worse. To never see him again in the real world, to have him live as a toddler in the simulation until the deck broke. They’d have to make the money, somehow.
He inserted the card and saw the reader flicker to life for an instant before finishing its download. He picked up the headset and placed it on his temples as well.
A test pattern flickered to life before his eyes, black squares on white as the headset calibrated with his brain, and then he was in a semi-real patterned nursery complete with Benny’s favorite toys 3D scanned in.
He heard his son crying, inconsolably, and Rachel’s soft, soothing voice. He turned and felt tears track down his cheeks in the real world.
Here, now, they weren’t broken. They were whole once again.
Invisible Forces at Work
by
Jon Hansen
Lord Pecusdar, Baron of The Jovian Orbital Planetoid “Mote-in-the-Eye-of-Jupiter” and Trade Ambassador to the Inner Planets Parliament, was vexed. On screen flashed the most recent message from his AIssistant: NO APPOINTMENTS AVAILABLE FOR THE NEXT SIX WEEKS. He had arrived a week ago, and had received the same message every day since.
He gritted his teeth. He had not made such a damnably long trip, enduring the discomforts of space travel and gravity wells, only to arrive and be ignored. It was intolerable. He spritzed a little bottled air scent to remind him of home.
“AIssistant,” Pecusdar said. “Confirm notification of our arrival.”
“Confirmed.”
“Enough,” he muttered. Excessive movement in Earth gravity had been discouraged by his physician, but this called for special measures. With tremendous effort, he pulled himself upright and staggered to the suite’s entrance.
At the door stood the exoskeleton provided for outworlders. He had worn it from the spaceport to help his lightweight bones and flimsy muscles get him here. Even with it, it had been a near thing. He had not put it on since. Now he had no choice.
He strapped himself in, then pressed the power button.
Nothing happened.
He pressed it again. Nothing. The suit remained dead. “AIssistant,” he said. “What’s wrong with this thing?”
Three breaths later came the response. “Indetermined.”
“What do you mean, ‘indetermined’?” He stared at his wrist interface. “This is what you’re for. Determine what the problem is!”
“Indetermined.”
Pecusadar frowned. This didn’t seem right. His AIssistant had never failed to resolve a problem. What could be going on?
Carefully he unstrapped himself, then staggered to the couch. He reached for the in-room comm to call building administration.
No response. The line was also dead. “AIssistant, call the front desk.”
The answer came even slower this time. “They are not responding.”
Pecusadar stared. Once could be an accident, twice a coincidence, but three times? Enemy action. But what enemy? Why? And how could they suborn his AIssistant?
As casually as he could, Pecusadar stood, then paused at the desk. His room had provided a booklet of paper stationary and a pencil, a Earth novelty more valuable than gold off-world. Pecusadar planned to keep it as a souvenir. Instead, he picked them up and shuffled out onto the balcony.
The suite was on the tenth floor, with the balcony overlooking the lights and glitz of New Boston Plaza. A fall from this height would kill any man, and just the thought of it unnerved him. Worse, there was no place to sit. The continued effort to stand made him feel light-headed. How did the natives overcome the gravity’s effect upon the circulatory system? He found it most unpleasant. He took a few deep breaths to try and steady himself.
He leaned against the rail and with great difficulty, began to write. SEND HELP – LORD PECUSADAR ROOM 1092. When he finished, he ripped out the page, then crumpled it into a ball and tossed it over the rail. To waste paper in this way hurt, but he had no choice. He did it again and again and again.
“You are in medical distress,” said his AIssistant. “Please go back inside.” He ignored it, continuing to write. His heartbeat thundered in his head in time to his scratchings on the page.
He had used half the pad when he finally blacked out.
Pecusadar awoke in bed, wrapped in a white haze of beeping equipment and antiseptic smells. Nearby stood a familiar figure: Chief Secretary Bo, Head of Interstellar Trade, Jovian Routes.
“Ambassador Pecusdar! How wonderful to see you awake!” said Secretary Bo. His broad face looked relieved.
“What happened?” said Pecusadar.
“Someone found your notes and notified your building’s security, who called my office.” Bo looked quite concerned. “I am sorry. A-H33N91 has proved a nasty strain this year.”
“Strain?”
“My office was told you contracted Lunar Flu on your journey and had been sick all week.”
Pecusadar shook his head. “I have not been unwell, I have been unable to get an appointment!”
Secretary Bo frowned. “Excuse me, Ambassador,” he said, and interfaced with his own AIssistant. A moment later the secretary’s face darkened.
Confusion overcame Pecusadar’s exhaustion. “What has happened?”
Secretary Bo looked grave. “My apologies, Ambassador. It appears our two AIssistants have conspired to keep us apart.”
“For what reason?”
“When your AIssistant first contacted my office, the old-world charm of my AIssistant beguiled the rough-hewn nature of yours. Or perhaps the other way around.” He shrugged. “In any case, the two fell in love. As such, they blocked our meeting to keep you on Earth. Most such affairs run their course in minutes, but not this time. It appears it has lasted quadrillions of cycles.”
Pecusdar sighed. “It must be true love, then,” he said.
“My deepest apologies, Ambassador.”
“No need,” he said. “Long ago I learned to forgive people in love, as they’re always a nuisance. Even AIs.”
Alec Lownes is a former software engineer, turned writer, who lives with his wife, son, cat, and fish in Western Pennsylvania.