Maria’s Story

211 Years Ago

July 10, 2282

Dr. Maria Arena smoothed the gray suit over her thighs, then sternly told herself not to be nervous. She was over one hundred years old and had dealt with clients before. Not necessarily in this case, admittedly. She was dabbling in some serious business now, but she knew her trade, and even in a fancy pantsuit, she was still herself.

A disgraced and unemployable pariah, but still herself.

The self-driving limousine stopped and a doorman hurried to help her out of the car. The silk-blend clothing caressed her skin, making her shiver. She accepted the help, feeling ridiculous, considering she wasn’t wearing heels or a dress.

“Dr. Arena,” the doorman murmured. “Welcome to Firetown.”

Firetown was the tallest building in the world, one full kilometer tall, built like a city so that no one ever had to leave. It had a shopping mall, hotels, grocery stores, hospitals, nightclubs, theaters, parks, fitness centers; it even had a homeless population squatting on the fifty-first floor. It did not have any places of worship.

Firetown was built in New York City at the site of the first clone uprising. The owner of the building, Sallie Mignon, had built it as a safe haven for clones. One-third of the world’s population of clones lived in the building. Maria had never visited it before, and was in awe.

They walked through the foyer, which looked a lot like a hotel, with a reception desk staffed with smartly dressed people and mirrored walls. Maria caught her reflection and stood a little taller. She stopped by the desk.

“Dr. Maria Arena, I should be expected,” she said to the short, brown-skinned woman behind the desk.

The woman, whose name tag said GAJRA, smiled, brushed her long sheet of black hair out of her face, and nodded to Maria. “You are, Dr. Arena,” she said. “Please let me show you to our VIP lift.”

She led Maria past a mass of at least twenty elevators, where people waited patiently in a long queue, and down a hallway decorated with red-and-gold damask wallpaper. She opened a door with a key card and ushered Maria in before her.

A smaller lobby was here, looking like an outdoor grotto with plants, stone floors, a fountain, and a couple of beautiful people lazing about. Maria wondered if they were paid to make the place look desirable, and thought it would be an easy, but dreadfully dull, job.

One elevator stood in the center of the far wall, and Gajra used her key card again and smiled. “Right this way,” she said when the doors opened.

“Which floor?” Maria asked, stepping into the elevator, which, with blue carpet and mirrored walls, was as posh as the rest of the place.

“There is only one choice,” Gajra said, pointing to the button on the console. It said “95.” The doors closed on Gajra’s smile, and Maria took a deep breath. The console didn’t even have OPEN DOOR and CLOSE DOOR buttons, and no emergency phone, but she had to trust in superior architecture. She pushed “95” and prepared herself for the ear-popping journey.

After two floors, the back wall disappeared and she saw that the elevator was glass, mirrored only on three sides, and open to the world on the fourth. She rose with an odd sense that it was the city moving away from her, not herself rising above it.

She closed her eyes against the vertigo, higher than she had ever been aside from planes. She faced the doors and took another deep breath. You’ve got this.

The doors opened into a penthouse that defied logic. It looked more like a museum, complete with priceless paintings and statues and marble floors, but in a disjointed way, sippy cups and toy trucks sat on tables and a half-eaten energy bar was on the floor. Maria was surprised; clones were sterilized on a DNA level, and most were happy to be. Cloning was an inherently selfish action, after all; you left your inheritance to your next incarnation. But they could be stepkids, or children of a family member, or fosters, or adopted kids. She then remembered something about Sallie’s human partner having children.

A small gray shih tzu hurtled down the hall, screaming at her, and she nudged the discarded energy bar at it, distracting it. It got its teeth into the bar and dragged it away, growling.

“Well, you know how to handle Titan, I’ll give you that,” said a voice behind her.

Sallie Mignon was small, compact, with warm brown skin and light-brown hair that surrounded her head in a halo. She didn’t look like one of the most ruthless businesswomen in the world, the one who’d single-handedly ruined AT&Veriz because her business rival, Ben Seims, was named CEO. Once they went bankrupt, she bought them out and fired him. The woman had made her billions in vertical real estate, financing hugely tall buildings and even, some said, part of the Luna dome. Rumors were rampant about her, behind closed doors and in the tabloids. She was one of the first clones, she was the first clone, she killed the first clone, she was going to influence a law change to let clones hold office again, she already ran the president like a puppet. She had a stable of spies entrenched in every competitor’s staff, at VP or higher. She made a small fortune just by selling short at the right time and was never caught insider trading. She had stopped a war brewing between Russia and Australia because her college buddy lived in Guam and didn’t want to be caught in the middle. She’d tried to get the war started because an ex-lover lived in Guam and she wanted him caught in the middle.

Rumors were everywhere, but everyone agreed that Sallie Mignon and Guam were somehow involved. And the war didn’t happen, to the world’s relief.

Currently she wore a stained sweatshirt and a pair of silk-denim-blend jeans.

She held out her hand to Maria, who shook it. She walked past her and gestured for her to follow, casually removing the yellow yarn that had been strung around a statue in the foyer.

“I need some programming done,” Sallie said as she led Maria into the kitchen. It was the kind of gleaming, state-of-the-art kitchen you found in home magazines, only it looked actually lived in, with dirty dishes in the sink, a linen grocery bag discarded in the corner, and a philodendron that needed watering.

“I, ah, ma’am, I am not a programmer,” Maria said out of habit.

Sallie looked over her shoulder, her eyes catching and holding Maria’s. “Yeah, I know the jargon. But you’re safe here. I even told my maid not to come today,” she said, pointing at the dirty dishes. “The nanny took the kids to floor forty-five to a movie. In short, cut the bullshit and don’t waste my time. You’re a programmer. I need programming done.”

“All right. Then what kind of programming do you need?” Maria said, the word feeling verboten in her mouth.

Even though the world summit to determine the rights of clones was a few months away, the United States and Cuba already had created local laws to control what in a clone’s mindmap could be edited. Everyone assumed the world would follow North America’s lead.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Maria was currently out of a job. Talented programmers were getting fired—and socially outcast—all over the place. Most went back to school to learn another trade, but some stubbornly kept doing it, only underground.

The hackers didn’t look good, admittedly, after the bathtub babies and other illegal and unethical actions. When those news stories broke, the riots against cloning started, and things got dangerous.

Maria had worked for years perfecting the art of mindmap manipulation. She’d never even shoplifted before. Now she was breaking much larger laws. And now the most powerful person in the country wanted her services.

“I don’t comply in the murder of innocents, I won’t be party to building a superman, and my fees are non-negotiable,” Maria said, sitting down at the kitchen table and crossing her legs. She felt more at home discussing her business instead of being intimidated by a powerful figure.

Sallie shook her head, sitting down across from Maria. “I’m not asking for any of that.” She jerked her head toward a closed door on the far wall. “I want to know if you’ll hack my partner, Jerome. It’s his first life. He’s going to be cloned, but he’s got MS. His brother, his father, and his grandmother all have it. He’s dying. If I clone him the way he is, he will have to look forward to pain and a slow roll downhill every life. And we don’t know how long he will live. He wants to kill himself now, and I can’t let him. I can’t.”

“Removing MS? Is that all? I can do that.” She had done worse, for less. The day after she had manipulated an infant’s DNA to make her have blue eyes and a prettier face, as well as remove the mutation that caused cerebral palsy, she had drunk herself into a stupor. She told herself she hadn’t had a part in the girl’s infanticide, that crime the parents had on their consciences, but her hands still felt dirty.

She dipped her hand into her jacket’s interior pocket to fetch her terms. She passed the tablet across the table, the file with her information open. “Price. What I will do and what I won’t do. Risks involved with messing with someone’s DNA matrix. And the legal ramifications if we get caught.”

Sallie’s eyes skimmed the screen with the practiced ease of someone looking for a “gotcha” in a contract. “I cover your legal fees if you’re caught. Nice touch.”

Maria shrugged. “Self-preservation is one of the signs of sentient life,” she said.

Sallie put her thumb on the tablet’s sensor, signing the document. Without looking up, she said, “If you’re doing something illegal, then isn’t this contract pointless?”

“I like to keep track of my clients and be able to remind them what we had agreed to,” Maria said. She handed Sallie an empty memory drive. “Put his mindmap on here. I’ll take him home and deal with it. You can have him back tomorrow.”

“You can do the programming here. Please,” Sallie said, the steel in her voice countering the politeness of the words. “I am not in the habit of letting my partner’s matrix out the door, much less out of the state.”

Maria sighed. “And I am not in the habit of using someone else’s network to do my type of work. Which is highly illegal, as you said. I know the security on my home system, but I don’t know yours.”

“Is this a dealbreaker?” she asked, eyes holding Maria’s. “You’d be throwing away millions of yuan.”

Maria’s investments hadn’t been the best in her first decades as a clone, and she wasn’t as wealthy as she would like to be. But too many traps, tracers, and spiders could trace her work if she wasn’t 100 percent secure, and it could hurt her legally and professionally if her proprietary code got out.

She bit her lip, and then nodded. “Yes. It’s far too risky.” She stood up. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Ms. Mignon. It’s a pleasure to have met you.” She held out her hand.

Sallie stared at the hand, and then laughed. “Finally, someone with a spine. Fine. You can use your home system.”

Maria let out a sigh, not expecting this to be a test of her mettle.

Sallie grabbed a drive off the kitchen counter. “But I’m going with you.”

  

One call to a caretaker for Jerome, one call to the private stable hand who managed Sallie’s fleet of self-driving cars, one call to the airport, and the donning of a leather jacket over Maria’s dirty sweatshirt later, and Maria and Sallie were gliding through New York City traffic toward JFK.

“Don’t you want to tell your kids good-bye?” Maria asked.

“I had a feeling I would be going on a trip today, so they already know.”

“How did you know you’d be coming back with me?”

“I have studied you, Maria. I’m not in the practice of hiring fools. I knew you wouldn’t want to work on my network.”

They went through a cursory security check done for the very powerful, and then they were in first class.

“Why didn’t you bring Jerome to see me, if you knew you’d be coming to Florida?” Maria asked.

“Because I wanted to meet you first,” Sallie said. “Easier that way, in case I was wrong about you.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have your own jet. Don’t you own all of Firetown?” Maria asked.

“I don’t like to fly. I don’t see any point in spending more on flight than I need to.” Sallie accepted both mimosas offered by the flight attendant. She downed one and held the other one, not passing it to Maria.

Maria wondered if she had left her apartment clean this morning.

“Do you like living in Florida?” Sallie asked, holding her hand up to the flight attendant. “Two mimosas for my friend here.”

“Yes, Ms. Mignon,” he said deferentially.

“It’s nice,” Maria said. “I’m close enough to Cuba to visit easily but far enough away that my family doesn’t get uncomfortable.”

Sallie laughed. “You still have family?”

“Sure, we all do. I never had kids, but occasionally a great-great-great-nephew or -niece will seek me out and ask for a favor.”

“Parasites,” Sallie said.

Maria shook her head. “Family. It’s usually no problem for me to help them out.”

“You’re generous,” Sallie said. “I wouldn’t be such a pushover. It doesn’t teach them anything.”

“Why do I have to teach them anything?” Maria asked. “Does every encounter need to teach them something?”

She took the offered mimosas and drank one quickly, then nursed the second one. The attendant came back to retrieve their empty glasses, and they sat in silence through the flight safety information. Sallie watched the attendant; Maria watched Sallie, amazed to see someone be so focused on the oft-repeated information.

The plane shuddered slightly as it rose into the air. Sallie kept her eyes on the seat in front of her. “People are like dogs,” she said as if they hadn’t broken the conversation. “Every moment teaches them something. They whine at the door, you let them out because the whining is annoying you, they learn that whining opens the door. You give them a treat before your evening glass of wine, then the dog learns that when that bottle comes out, a treat is supposed to follow it.”

“And if you give a relative some money, do you teach them not to work? Is that your opinion of charity and gifts in general?” Maria asked.

“I like giving to people who really need it, and those who earn it, not lazy people who won’t work. Do your relatives work?”

“I like to think that they don’t need to fill out an application to get a gift from their aunt,” Maria said stiffly.

“Calm down, I’m not going to take away your family’s lollipops,” Sallie said, relaxing slightly. “I was just making conversation.”

Maria looked at Sallie’s posture and her hands flat on her knees in the perfect image of relaxation. Too perfect. “Sallie, why were you so eager to fly home with me if you hate flying so much?” she asked.

Sallie winced. “I wish you hadn’t brought it up,” she said.

“So answer in as few words as possible,” Maria suggested.

“I don’t like to do it. But I have to do it for business. All the time. You can’t own buildings in Pan Pacific if you don’t ever go there. It’s bad investing.”

“So you’re like someone who’s afraid of needles who needs frequent allergy shots or something?” Maria asked.

“Pretty much,” Sallie said. “Can we argue about your deadbeat family again?”

“It’s a short flight, don’t worry about it.”

“That’s because we’re going so damn fast,” Sallie said. “Flights used to take longer, but they were slower and safer.”

“I’m fairly sure if you hit the ground going five hundred miles per hour, you’re as dead as you would be going twelve hundred fifty miles per hour.”

Sallie gritted her teeth. “That’s not helping.”

They talked about Sallie’s kids and Maria’s nieces and nephews for the rest of the flight, and once they touched down in Miami, Sallie’s posture was almost that of a human’s.

Maria lived in a run-down apartment building south of Miami in a neighborhood that was not considered the best. They passed a few really old cars that still required drivers, rusty and battered. Auto mechanics had a good business going keeping old-time cars running since self-driving cars had become the norm. Now the only people who drove cars were rich people who liked the freedom and the novelty, and poor people who couldn’t afford to upgrade to self-driving.

Maria appreciated that Sallie didn’t say anything about their destination, but then realized that she probably already knew all of her personal details, if she had been doing research on Maria. When they got to Maria’s third-floor flat, Maria took out her key card, slid it in, and took a small black box out of her purse. She pointed it at the door and lasers turned on to make a number pad appear. She keyed in a seven-digit code and turned off the laser. The door popped open.

Sallie raised an eyebrow. “You weren’t kidding about security.”

Maria grinned. “That’s just the start of it.”

She opened her door and ushered Sallie in. The dark-brown floors were dotted here and there with white, fluffy rugs. Her living room furniture was all black leather, pointing at a wall where a gas fireplace sat decoratively. From the ceiling hung a square projector, designed to show video on her white wall. Art, done by a lot of the modern-day surrealists, splashed along the walls, including one striking “piece” of purples and reds.

Sallie pointed at it. “Is that a Fogarty?” she asked. “Painted directly on your wall?”

“Yeah,” Maria said, heading into her bedroom to lose the business suit. “He’s a friend.”

“Did you hire him to paint it?” Sallie called from the living room.

Maria laid her suit on her unmade bed and got some jeans and a T-shirt from her drawer. “Not exactly. I was hosting a party and he got drunk and decided to declare his love for me. So he went to town on my wall. First I was mad, and then I thought I had the most expensive wall in Miami, and was okay with it.”

It sounded as if Sallie had moved on to another painting. “Van Gogh could have learned something from him. Did you two date?”

“Briefly,” Maria said. “There wasn’t much of a spark there. But damn, he could paint.”

“I was pondering doing a patronage program to fund artists’ cloning efforts,” Sallie said. “We were going to support them and clone them so they could continue creating. But Jerome said it sounded like indentured servitude.” She made a face.

“It does kind of sound like you want them to keep creating, but if they quit, then you won’t clone them anymore.”

“That’s a bit extreme. And how can you stop a creator from creating? I found different places to put my money.”

Maria finished getting dressed. She left her bedroom and saw Sallie in front of another Fogarty original, this one properly on a canvas. Sallie pointed back to the on-the-wall art piece. “Is that why you haven’t moved?”

“It’s one reason,” she said. “Other reasons include I started sprucing the place up when I started making money, and then realized if I left, I’d have to set a new place up with all these measures. So I just stayed. Makes me less of a target for theft, so long as I keep my head down.”

“And doesn’t make people assume you’re a wealthy hacker either,” Sallie said.

Maria grinned. “That too.” She held her hand out. “Now, let’s look at this DNA matrix.”

After two hours of studying the code that made Jerome’s mindmap, Maria identified the genetic anomaly that led to later-life MS. She inserted code to comment out the data and cleaned up around it so the new DNA wouldn’t try to grasp onto a missing strand.

“Why don’t you just delete it?” Sallie asked.

“Too dangerous. Anyway, commenting out the code means that it’s still there, so if I mess something up, I can revert to the old code.”

“So you don’t keep backups?”

Maria kept her eyes on the screen. “No, keeping backups of peoples’ maps for personal use is unethical. My clients get back all the data they gave to me.”

She offered Sallie a beverage while she took a break, and rubbed her eyes as the coffee brewed.

“Thank you for doing this,” Sallie said, looking tired and a little wide-eyed. “You are as good as people said you are.”

“Thank you,” Maria said, getting mugs.

“I’m curious,” Sallie said. “While you’re in there, can you change a few other things?”

“Depends on what it is, but sure.”

“Make him love me more. Make him never cheat on me again. Make him not be angry that I cloned him,” Sallie said bitterly.

Maria turned in surprise, blanching at the pain on Sallie’s face. “He hasn’t consented to the cloning?”

“Not yet. He’s going to die soon, and he’s worried we will have problems when he is twenty-five again and I’ll still look in my fifties. Never mind that I reminded him I am much older than he is. He doesn’t understand.”

Maria shook her head. “Most don’t, until they’ve been cloned.” She paused, chewing on her lip. “Are you serious, about those things you want?”

Sallie returned from her anguish for a moment and wiped at her eyes. “Do you think you can do something that intricate? I didn’t think it was actually possible.”

Maria shrugged uncomfortably. “Not many people can do it. It’s what I do best, though, which is why I’m still doing it on the black market. I can do a lot of what you asked for. Not everything. Every hack I do to a personality is dangerous, though. Cutting out the MS from a matrix was easy. Messing with a person’s sense of self, their emotions, that’s more complex. It’s risky.”

Sallie stared at the numbers on the screen, flashing different colors in a language that Maria knew well. She nodded, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Do it.”

Maria turned back to the terminal and hunted again through the terabytes of information, looking for love, infidelity, and forgiveness. She began to program the changes to Sallie’s partner.

At this point, she wasn’t in a position to judge her clients.

But she never saw that vulnerable, teary-eyed version of Sallie again.

 

 

119 Years Ago

October 1, 2374

The reporter was young and white, with a Roman numeral I tattooed on her wrist. This was the fad of the time, where humans liked to show via tattoo that they were the first of a long line, intending on being cloned on their death. It was like calling something the first annual celebration. You can’t have a first until you have a second.

Maria hadn’t wanted to come to this meeting. But she’d been on retainer for Sallie Mignon for almost a hundred years, and had amassed quite a bit of wealth. She did what Sallie asked.

The reporter had tattoos on her face, another luxury of the non-clone lifestyle. She had a star on her left cheek and half of her head was shaved, with more stars along her scalp. Her right side had long, straight blue hair.

She’d been brazenly writing on both sides of the clone riots, crowing about being balanced with her reporting, but not hesitating to dig up very old dirt on some prominent clones. Annoying as she was, she was as good at doing research as Maria was hunting through mindmap code. Sallie had put her on the payroll because she admired her moxie.

Her name was Martini, and that’s what she drank, the finest vodka that Sallie could buy. After the drinks arrived (whiskey for Sallie and Maria), Sallie smiled pleasantly. She got out her tablet and pulled up the front page of the New York Times. TERRORIST CLONES RIOT WORLD- AND LUNA-WIDE, DOZENS INJURED IN ATTEMPT TO SABOTAGE NEW GENERATION STARSHIP DORMIRE: LAUNCH DELAYED POSSIBLY BY YEARS blasted across the front, with a picture of Luna taken from outside the dome. Someone had been murdered messily on the other side, close enough to splatter blood on the synthetic diamond structure.

Some Pulitzer-seeking photojournalist had ventured outside in an enviro suit just to get that photo.

“What went wrong here?” Sallie asked Martini.

Martini shrugged. “Clones don’t like that humans get to colonize the new planet. They rioted, tried to bust up the ship. Didn’t you read the story?”

Maria hid a grimace behind her glass. This woman hadn’t been in Sallie’s employ long enough to discover what to say and, more important, what not to say.

“I mean, I don’t control the news. How do clones expect to come back from that and still look like the good guys?” she continued.

“I pay you to control the news,” Sallie said. “How you do it, I don’t care. But you tell the story that benefits clones on a large scale, me on a small scale. There are tens of thousands of clones, many of us working well within humanity’s laws. And we were working to get a server on that ship so that clones may travel to Artemis as well. And yet your paper labels us terrorists.”

“But—” Martini said, but Sallie was on a roll.

“Extremist individuals live inside every single group on the planet. Devout followers from Christian to Muslim who kill in the name of God, down to people who perpetuate a cycle of abuse from parent to child. And do you know at what point they’re labeled as terrorists?”

Martini said. “When the government—”

“When the news reports it. The news can take a starving refugee and make them into an invading migrant. One of my Black ancestors was photographed carrying diapers over his head after a flood. They called him a ‘looter.’ A white man was photographed doing the same thing. They called him a ‘survivor.’ When you came to me for a job, I thought you knew the power of the news. But you let this”—she slammed her hand on the tablet, cracking the screen—“get printed.”

“I didn’t write it,” Martini squeaked, finally registering the anger of her small employer.

“Then you edit it before it goes live. Your job is to control the news, not to write glowing pieces about clones. Do you know what happened after this ran?”

Martini shook her head. Maria gingerly removed the tablet, its screen spider-webbed over the offending headline, and slipped it into her bag.

“They’re not going to allow the clone server on the ship now. It’s humans only. I’ve sunk billions into this project so I could live on another planet, Martini, and you have ruined it with one story.”

“But the sabotaging clones ruined it!” she said. “It wasn’t my fault!”

“I hired you for a job. You didn’t do the job. So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to get your wish to be cloned at my private facility. But Maria here is going to work on your mindmap to ensure you no longer make these bad decisions.”

Maria went cold. So this is why I’m at this meeting.

Martini shook her head, eyes filling with tears. “No, please, don’t mess with my head, I can do better next time, I’ll get them to retract it, I’ll get them to get the server on the ship!”

“How?” Sallie asked, her eyes narrowed.

She and Martini made a plan; with the threat of mindmap manipulation, Martini was suddenly eager to brainstorm ideas on how to remedy the situation.

Maria signaled for another round of drinks, trying to dull the panic. One waiter attended them, and Maria became aware of the fact that the entire staff in the nearly empty bar had studiously been ignoring them.

Sallie could grease a palm, that was for sure.

  

Later that night, in the back of the limo as they whisked back to Firetown, Sallie asked Maria why she was so quiet.

“You threatened her. In the most unethical way possible.”

Sallie snorted. “It’s a little late for you to worry about ethics. What have you been doing for the past hundred years?”

“You know my terms. There are lines I won’t cross.”

“I thought we had an understanding by now,” Sallie said coldly.

“I did too,” Maria said.

“We don’t need to do it anyway,” Sallie said. “We got her back on track for us.”

“I am not a scalpel for you to wave around and threaten people with,” Maria said. “I’m going to have to resign my post.”

Sallie watched the city out the window, her face a mask.

“All right. Best of luck to you.”

She didn’t offer more money. She didn’t threaten me. She wouldn’t just let me go like that.

Maria focused on her own window while she wondered what Sallie really was thinking. Her lack of resistance was the scariest thing of all.

She was arrested for illegal hacking two days after ending her work with Sallie.

Decades later, when she was offered a crew spot on the Dormire for good behavior, she figured she was due for a win, and took it.