My daughter killed me Tuesday morning.
I opened my front door and there she was in the hallway, armed with a wood axe.
“Cheryl—” I blurted.
“Hi, Mom,” she said, and swung the axe.
My ribs made a funny sound. Chock. The noise reminded me of a dropped watermelon striking a tile floor. Suddenly all the thoughts that come with death burst forth in my head. Memories. Fear. Denial. It’s going to miss, it’s going to miss. But it had already struck, and I was sliding quickly into shock.
My left knee banged against the doorsill; the right collapsed altogether. My face swung down over a puddle of blood. It seemed odd to discover this red, wet liquid soaking into my welcome mat. It didn’t register that the torrent originated from the vicinity of my left lung.
I suppose I felt a lot of pain, but my nanodocs have edited out the memory. It must have hurt, because my mouth popped open and stayed that way. I couldn’t say a single word. Just as well, I suppose, considering the language I would have used had I been capable.
Cheryl whacked me on the spine next. I sprawled over the threshold. I guess I must have died at about that point, because the next thing I knew my ethereal self manifested up near the ceiling. I had a bird’s-eye view as Cheryl brought the axe down like Paul Bunyan on my neck. My head bounced down the hallway and came to a stop against the potted fern by the elevator.
Cheryl regarded my decapitated body. The damn kid didn’t even have the decency to turn green. She sighed, tossed the axe and her bloodstained clothes into the recycler, cleaned herself up, generated a new outfit from my wardrobe player, and left the apartment. She stole the barrette from my hair on her way to the elevator.
My ethereal self haunted the corridor, still too connected to the flesh to disappear into the Big White Light. Below me the nanodocs initiated resuscitation.
The big choice must have been whether to put my head back on my body, or my body back under my head. The docs chose the latter, probably because rebuilding the brain would take all that double-checking. I agreed with the choice — not that my condition allowed me to have any input.
Molecule by molecule, the docs stole material from the mess on the apartment threshold and funneled it down the hallway. A grainy stream, looking for all the world like a parade of sugar ants, gathered at my neck.
Once they got going, the docs worked quickly. My spine formed, only to vanish under layers of connective tissue, nerves, muscle, and fat. The corpse in the doorway dissolved steadily. The docs didn’t neglect the blood in the carpet and the welcome mat; raw material was raw material.
Something pulled at my ethereal self. I descended.
I awoke to the tickle of a fern frond against my eyebrow. Instinctively I reached for my throat. No seam. Of course not.
Someone was standing beside me.
I jerked into a sitting position, hands up to guard my head. Then I saw who it was.
“Oh. Hi. Joan.”
I extracted the words with invisible forceps. I guess part of me wasn’t convinced my vocal cords would function.
My neighbor surveyed me as if she were a Mark Twain schoolmarm. Never mind that her body morph presented her as a stylish, if a bit voluptuous, nineteen-year-old blonde. Her carriage betrayed that she was really a prune-faced, four-hundred-year-old gossip.
“Your daughter again?” Joan asked. Her eyebrows drew together, broadcasting sympathy, yet somehow that concern did not extend to helping me up.
“Yeah. My daughter.” I didn’t offer specifics. Joan was bound to make up something even more embarrassing than the truth, no matter what I told her. Might as well not give her grist for the mill. At least she probably hadn’t seen the axe.
“The kids today — they just aren’t like we were.” The eyebrows stayed drawn.
Count on Joan for a handy cliché. Yet to my dismay, I had to agree with her this time.
“Got to run. Drop by later if you need to talk,” Joan said, putting on her confidante hat.
Sure, Joan.
Once she was gone, I climbed to my feet. My reflection shimmered in the brass of the elevator door. My hair hung in disarray. If someone had shouted “Boo!” right then, my head would have fallen off again. I stumbled into my apartment, closed the door, and sagged onto my sofa.
Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl. Sixty-one years old and still acting like four.
The clock in the entertainment console advanced to 9:22am. Twelve minutes had passed since Cheryl had arrived at my door. That alone told me how careful the nanodocs had been as they repaired my tissues, edited the pain out of my memory, made safety checks, and kick-started my autonomic functions.
I’d been killed, one way or another, five other times in my life. But used to it or not, I could barely rise from the sofa.
I grabbed my kimono off the floor by the front door. My hand fit right through the rents over the left breast and center of the back. I tossed the garment into the recycler and coded the wardrobe player to generate another in the morning. Same style, but I altered the sash to lavender. No way could I stand to wear a red one for a while.
I stank. The docs had put back every particle of my body, right down to the thin layer of perspiration that had burst from my skin the instant the axe swung.
I stepped into the cleanser. My skin tingled as the scrubbers vacuumed out my pores and dissolved the carpet lint in my hair. Feeling distinctly better, I sat down at my dining table and ordered it to create a pot of hot chamomile tea. Only after the first cupful — when I was damn good and ready — did I ask the Link to put me in touch with Cheryl’s therapist.
“You were right,” I said as soon as Ellen’s virtual self materialized in one of my dining chairs.
“Matricide?” she asked.
“A regular tribute to Lizzy Borden,” I replied. Ellen listened intently to the description of the assault. Like many psychologists, she affected the appearance of a studious person just entering classic middle age, complete with crow’s feet at the outer corners of her eyes, an extra freckle or two on the cheeks, and strands of gray in her auburn hair. All these centuries since eternal youth became the norm, it’s still easier to take advice from someone who projects an aura of maturity and experience.
I wondered what sort of morph she wore during her private time. Preadolescent, maybe?
“Well,” Ellen said. “I wish she’d proven me wrong. At least you weren’t taken totally by surprise.”
I thought of the swinging axe. Not taken by surprise? I shuddered. She’d forewarned me that Cheryl would try to kill me, but that didn’t mean I was prepared for the attempt to succeed, or to be done so . . . vividly.
“I don’t know if I can go through this again,” I said. “You should have seen her face.”
Ellen placed her phantom hand atop mine. Strangely, it soothed me. Any other person would have acknowledged the intangibility of the Link and not bothered to reach out. She seemed to know it was what I needed. It was an example of why she’d reached adept level in her profession.
“What would you ordinarily have done if you didn’t have me to call?” she asked.
I saw what she was getting at. “I would have called Cheryl and asked her what the hell was up.”
The psychologist nodded. “And she knows that. We’ve got to show her that the rules have changed.”
“I know. I didn’t really think she’d resort to murder, though.”
“She’s never had to before.” Ellen leaned back. “You know, it’s not too late to change the plan. I could still petition for a personality remorph. It would be easier on everybody.”
My fingers tightened around the teacup. “Not easier for Cheryl.”
Ellen pursed her lips. “Actually it would be. Once it’s done, the new Cheryl would thank us.”
The new Cheryl. I cringed, thinking of someone I’d known who’d had a personality remorph. “No,” I said. “I can’t. Not yet.”
Was that approval in the psychologist’s pensive smile? “Then we’ll have to work it through. I’ll talk to her today. I don’t expect much, though. You should expect to be killed at least one more time.”
I blanched. “I understand.”
Ellen prepared to blink out. “Anything else?” she asked.
I sighed. “I feel like a terrible mother.”
Ellen waited until I was willing to meet her glance straight on. “On the contrary. The problem is that you’ve been too good a mother. She needs the opposite right now.”
I bit my lip, and pretended that I accepted that.
“Your mom still hasn’t called, has she?” Giselle asked.
I pretended not to hear. Jacques was getting ready to jump. I focussed on that.
We were high in the Cascades, at the brink of a gorge. Scoured by glaciers and attacked by snow melt, the cliff below us was fissured and crumbling — not the smooth, tall, granite precipice type that attracts imagemakers and tourists. Steep, but nicely off the beaten track — we could usually get wilderness permits good at the site for an hour every week.
I could feel Giselle’s smug grin, even if I didn’t look at it. I yawned, projecting nonchalance. Not that it would fool anyone. Giselle knew me better than that.
Jacques leaped. He hit ass-first on a shelf about fifty feet down, probably breaking his pelvis. It slowed him down, but he regained enough momentum to tear open his viscera on a jagged projection a hundred feet below that. He bounced against the cliff, through brush and over ledges, losing parts of himself, and slammed to rest near the outcropping we all called Buffalo with an Attitude.
“Not bad,” Giselle commented. “He was probably conscious until that last series of boulders.” We both knew that meant a lot to Jacques. He preferred to leave his memories unedited. No pain, no gain.
“Coming with me?” Giselle sprang onto a rock at the very edge of the drop.
I shrugged. “Nah. I’ll wait another minute or two.”
“Oh, Cheryl,” she taunted. “If she hasn’t called by now, she’s not going to. You always expect so much.”
“Why don’t you give yourself a Tabasco sauce enema?” I asked.
She mocked an expression of deep offense. I glared at her. Her scowl transformed into a crooked smile, still a bit smug, but laced with a certain amount of empathy.
Giselle and I operated from the same foundation. She, Jacques, and I constituted half of the sixty-something-year-olds in all Oregon. She knew what it was like to be a kid born in a society of Old Farts. Except for us, everybody alive had been around ever since nanotechnology had eliminated aging. None of them knew what it was like to grow up among immortals. When they’d been young, their elders had politely croaked, opening up the good jobs, the good home sites, providing at least a chance to excel in some aspect of life. Giselle and I had met at Reed College, had tried to compete in classes with students back for their seventh or twelfth or twentieth degrees, and had joined the local chapter of the Suicidals together.
“Parents,” Giselle said, sighing. She had both a father and a mother, a fact I thought rather quaint. “Fuck ’em.”
She leaned farther and farther back, until the slightest breeze would have committed her to the plunge. She gazed downward over her shoulder. The anticipation stiffened her nipples until headlights formed along the front of her pullover sweater.
“Oh, look,” she said. “The coyotes are back.”
I peered down. A small pack of the animals circled near the base of the precipice. They yapped and whined, searching for pawholds in the scree. Obviously they smelled the blood and intestines with which Jacques had decorated the side of the mountain. My best guess said they wouldn’t be able to reach the spot where most of the corpse rested.
“Poor puppies,” Giselle said. “Do you think it’s the same bunch as last time?”
“Naturally,” I said. Though we hadn’t been here for a month or so, the three of us visited often enough that the critters had figured out the routine. Time before last I’d revived from a fall to see a young female and her litter scampering off with one of my legs; my nanodocs had to steal material from a nearby streambed to fashion the replacement. The park rangers would’ve given us hell if they’d found out.
Thrusting with her ankles, Giselle sailed clear of the cliff. Her trajectory, unlike that of Jacques, guaranteed she wouldn’t snag on anything on the way down.
“Choke on thiiiiiisss,” she screamed at the coyotes as she picked up speed.
She impacted quite fabulously on a shelf of jagged rocks well below Jacques’s partially repaired body. Even from my vantage point many hundreds of feet above I could see her brains spray, anointing the granite with a shade distinctly lighter than the crimson that smeared everything else.
Suicide Number 6,327 for her. She was one ahead of me, but I’d soon fix that.
Yet I waited. It was stupid. Giselle was right. If Monica had been going to call, she would have. But shit, all my dear mother had to do was say a few words to the Link and her virtual ass could sit itself down beside me, even for just a minute. Was that really too much to expect?
I stared at the high peaks jutting up above timberline to the north, kicked a pebble over the edge, and got ready to follow it.
“Call for you, Cheryl,” said the disembodied voice of the Link. “It’s Ellen Branson.”
Just fucking great. Well, I could refuse it, but she’d only keep bugging me. “Put her through,” I said.
Dr. Branson’s image materialized beside me. She sat in an invisible chair, her hair unruffled by the mountain breeze. She looked around, noticed the bodies below, and gave me that professional frown of concern she so carefully cultivated.
“I talked to your mother an hour ago,” she said. “Your stunt didn’t impress her.”
“It wasn’t supposed to impress her,” I said. “It was just supposed to get her attention.”
“You’re lucky she doesn’t file a complaint with the Net. They’ve just increased the community service time for murder and other misdemeanor assault, you know.”
“I’m real worried about it,” I quipped.
“You’ll miss work. You’ll blow your commission and have to petition for another career.”
“Another chance of a lifetime, thrown down the face of an Oregon mountain.” I wobbled and pretended to lose my balance. I leaned out over the gorge for several seconds, smiled demurely at Dr. Branson, and straightened up. “Why should I worry, Doc? I’ve filed a suicide petition. Pretty soon I won’t have to worry about anything. I’ll be checking out. Permanently.”
Dr. Branson massaged her forehead. “I’ve read your case history, dear. You’ve filed suicide petitions before. You have to refile every day for thirty days running before the Net will deactivate your docs. You always run out of steam before the end.”
I kicked her in her intangible knee. “So what? This time it’s real. I’m going all the way. You tell that to my mother.”
She sighed. “But she knows it’s not true. You’re just waiting for her to make a fuss over you like she’s always done. I think she’s tired of that. I think she’s leaving it for you to work it out on your own.”
“I have worked it out. In five days, I get archived. All I want is for her to acknowledge that.”
“Why should she? It’s not her problem.”
I blinked. Something about the matter-of-fact way Dr. Branson delivered her statement awakened my suspicions. I yelled so loudly it echoed across the gorge. “You’re telling her to ignore me, aren’t you?”
Doc folded her palms together. She didn’t actually smile, but I felt like a victim of the Cheshire Cat anyway. “Yes. I told your mother not to speak to you until you’ve cancelled the suicide petition.”
“Keep your nose where it belongs,” I said. “You’re supposed to be my therapist, not Monica’s. How the hell did I get reassigned to you? What are you, a journeyman, or a fucking apprentice?”
She didn’t answer that last part. “I am your therapist, Cheryl. Why does that scare you? Why do you have to try to run back to Mommie?”
“Cancel link,” I said. Dr. Branson’s image popped out just as she opened her mouth to utter some more bullshit.
Mom couldn’t keep it up. I knew her better than that. A lot better than any psychologist. I’d really thought the axe would do it, but if not — well, there were other ways.
I looked down to find Jacques, fully rebuilt, waving up at me. I waved back.
“That was nothing!” I yelled. “Take a look at this!”
I launched into the air. The bottom of the gorge raced up at me. On the rocks below, the coyotes licked their chops.
The transit pod dropped me off over on the west bank of the Willamette, in one of the old residential sections of town. I could tell just how long the neighborhood had been there because the trees and walkways still threaded among the houses in a vaguely gridlike pattern, following the courses of vanished streets. My assignment took me to a roomy old two-story Post Quake Revisionist set on a full third of an acre.
I asked the Net to play back the job request while I inspected the house and its grounds. The resident must have had some job rating to have scored all this for himself. A programmer, maybe, or even a regional policymaker. Talk about perks. There wasn’t even a co-occupant registered.
I wanted to tear my hair out. Here was I, a journeyman landscape architect for forty years, getting ready for my master certification, and the only housing the Net would grant me was an apartment. What I wouldn’t give for my own yard.
I double-checked the instructions. They didn’t make any sense to me. The yard’s present motif was the ultimate in western Oregon xeriscaping. The flora and microfauna were not much different from what might have inhabited the neighborhood in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries, or whenever this part of Portland had been settled. Someone, maybe even a maestro landscaper, had gone to a great deal of effort to create an environment perfectly suited to the house, to the city, and to the climate.
And I was supposed to change it?
I was still staring at the existing design, brows furrowed, when the occupant emerged. “Any problems?” he asked.
He was tall, blond, and muscular, the very epitome of maleness, yet he walked with a mincing gait. Maybe “he” was really a woman — the name on the job request was not gender-specific — but I didn’t think so. A woman who goes to the trouble of adopting a male morph usually does not use it to project female body language.
“Actually, yes,” I said. “This says you want lots of sun, but the foliage you’ve asked for is all deep-shade stuff. Hydrangeas, rhododendrons, azaleas. Your nanogardeners are going to have to compensate every summer to keep those thriving.”
“Isn’t that what they’re there for?” he asked.
I opened my mouth to reply, but closed it. I could tell already that I wasn’t going to win this one. “I’ll just get started,” I said evenly.
“Of course,” he said, as if I’d had no choice but to comply. He lingered. Oh, God. He was going to watch. I hated that.
His grounds control box lay half-hidden under a honeysuckle vine by the side of the house. I opened up the programming port, identified myself, and set to work.
I deconstituted the broad ash and walnut trees around the property line first, set the soil parameters for higher acidity and moisture, and assembled the new plants while the old ones dissolved. For ground cover I selected a Geary Classic strain of baby’s tears — one of those with the aqua undertones — from the maestro’s catalog of journeyman creations.
The resident pointed to a camellia bush. “I want that over by the steps.”
“But—” I stopped short of explaining how that positioning destroyed the front yard’s balance, but he seemed to guess what I would have said.
“Look, if this is that hard for you, I can request a new landscaper.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said with false cheer.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ve got an errand to run. I’ll be back later for the fine-tuning.”
A pod arrived for him and soon whisked him away. I was grateful.
Mother Nature was going to hate me for this day’s work.
As I labored, the high cloud cover withdrew, heralding a gorgeous afternoon. Time passed quickly. That was a rare blessing. In the two days since Cheryl had come at me with the axe, I’d spent every moment of it obsessed over her. It was good to be able to focus on something else.
I was programming the sunscreens on a bed of primroses when a pod descended into the cradle at the end of the lane. I kept my back turned, not looking forward to another encounter with the resident.
The footsteps behind me stopped. No voice. I looked.
Cheryl stood there, holding a handgun.
It was one of those ancient models with a silencer — I never remember the brand names. She must have gone to a lot of trouble to get it. I don’t know of many nanoplayers that permit creation of firearms. Perhaps she’d located an actual antique. The only time she ever showed real initiative was when she was up to no good. At least she wasn’t going to flaunt the local noise abatement ordinance.
I ducked sideways. Too late. Three slugs tore into my chest. I fell on the tile walkway and threw up blood all over the winery harvest scene I’d just coded into the mosaic. As I tried to raise my head, I lost consciousness.
I woke up hanging upside down from a pod. Healed but disoriented, I slowly recognized the watercourse below and behind me as the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia. We were heading east at a frightening rate of speed.
A rope held me tightly around one ankle, hemp gnawing into the skin. The acceleration and drag prevented me from reaching up to grasp it with my hands. I twisted around and saw Mount Hood expand to fill the horizon.
“Cheryl!” I screamed at the open pod door. “Stop it, Cheryl! This isn’t going to get you anywhere!”
Cheryl leaned out of the hatch. Wind blasted her hair to one side of her face. She waved and cupped her hand to her ear as if to say, “Sorry, Mom. Can’t hear you.”
“Cheryl! I’ll give you five seconds to knock this off. Otherwise I’m filing a complaint!”
I was lying. If I filed a complaint, the cops might interfere in ways Ellen Branson and I didn’t want them to. But it was the only threat I could come up with on the spur of the moment.
Mount Hood took over the scenery. Snow turned to steam near the caldera. The pod slowed. I swung back and forth on the cord, trying desperately not to lose my lunch again, assuming the docs had put it all back in my stomach.
The vivid orange tones of the caldera spread across the landscape below me. The pod came to a stop.
“Oh, no. She wouldn’t,” I whispered. Sweat began to pop from every crevice of my body. “Cheryl! Don’t you do it! Don’t you dare!”
I could finally grab the cord. I started frantically climbing hand over hand.
Cheryl stuck her head out of the hatch of the pod, smiled, and released the cord.
I fell through surprisingly cool air toward the sea of lava. I knew I wouldn’t just burn. I’d be vaporized. Sure enough. I landed, and that was that.
My ethereal self manifested high above the volcano. I watched Cheryl’s pod fade toward the horizon.
Below, my physical self had not left even a dark spot on the molten rock. With it so thoroughly eradicated, nothing hindered the death process. The Big White Light emerged from a cloud and hung there like a second sun. It drew me upward.
The characteristic, ineffable calm of death chased away all concerns. The events of the life I was leaving rolled past me, memory upon memory, but with a peculiar distance, a detachment. I was removed from all worries, obsessions, emotional triggers.
The Light took me away to wherever it is that dead folks go. If anything happened to me on the other side, I can’t remember it now. One instant I was rising toward the afterlife above a volcano, and in the next, I awoke in my apartment.
Naturally, as soon as the Net had verified that I didn’t exist anywhere in the civilized universe, the nanomat in my bed had reconstituted me, using the scan it had routinely taken of me during the night.
I raised onto my elbows, serenaded by the sound of the mat’s water reservoir refilling. Now the emotions came.
I put my hands over my face and shook. This was worse than the axe. I curled into a fetal position — an appropriate posture, all in all, considering that I had, in a sense, been reborn. The old Monica was dead, dead, dead.
Complete body annihilation is so rare in our culture that people forget that being shifted into a duplicate isn’t quite the seamless continuance it’s advertised to be. The body I currently inhabited didn’t exactly match the one that had been fried in the volcano. It was a copy of a me that had existed several hours earlier.
My mental recall of my experiences was intact — those memories were part of my consciousness, carried with my ethereal self. But my new body lacked the subtle molecular alterations that my old body had undergone, and without those, I had no access to my short-term emotional memory.
I recalled nothing of what I had felt that morning. I knew I hadn’t been pleased with the resident whose house I had landscaped, I knew I’d been scared when I’d fallen into the volcano, but now I scanned through those events as if they’d happened to some actress in a vid.
No matter that the missing emotions were those of job frustration, fear, and anger, they’d been mine. Now they were gone, killed as permanently as my whole person would have been had I been part of my grandmother’s generation. It was only a little piece of death, compared to what Granny went through, but it brought back all the old terror of mortality with a vengeance.
“Access Link,” I said, when I could stop trembling. “Branson, Ellen, psychologist. Priority interrupt.”
In moments, Ellen’s disembodied voice filled the room. “I’m with a client. Hang on a sec. I’ll come to you.”
She blinked in, saw me still lying on the nanomat, and flinched at my expression.
“Oh, dear. A total wipe?”
“You got it,” I said weakly.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Monica. I didn’t think she’d go that far. How in the hell did she—”
“A volcano.”
“Oh.” The therapist swallowed. “That would do it, I guess. This is no good. We have to shift our strategy.”
“No more strategies,” I said. “I believe her, Ellen. She’s going to archive herself. I think I should make arrangements with her to be there.” I huddled on the bed, wishing I were smaller.
“No. That’s exactly the wrong tactic. She’s sucked you in every other time, and it’s only perpetuated the cycle.”
“It’s kept her alive.”
“No,” Ellen said. “I thought we’d been through that. We’ve got a dependency here that has to be shown for what it is.”
I stared at Ellen through blurry eyes. How could she be so clear, so sure? I’d tried, really tried over the years to make Cheryl stand on her own. But when she did something dramatic, was it wrong of me to go overboard the other way and lavish her with attention until her mood passed? She was the only child I’d ever be permitted. If there was a dependency here, it was my fault. What if it were simply too soon in her life for her to grow up?
“What if you’re wrong?” I asked. “What if she really does archive herself?”
She hesitated, and that really scared me. I’d never seen Ellen doubt herself. “You lose a daughter. I lose a client, and maybe my adept rating as well,” she said softly.
“But you still think we should try?”
She nodded slowly. “I think it’s a gamble we have to take.”
Again the hesitation. But strangely, seeing that she was uncertain, too, pushed me past my own weakness.
“What’s next, then?” I asked.
Ellen paced to the far wall and back. “We can’t leave you exposed like this. We need to set up the time and place for the next confrontation. I want you to disappear for the next two days. Block the Link to incoming calls — all calls, just in case she gets one of her gonzo friends to access for her. Keep moving. Stay far away from home. But first, I want you to do some things here in the apartment. . . .”
I’d waited long enough. Did she think I had forever? Early afternoon, the day before the Big Check-Out, I tried to raise Mom on the Link.
“Access blocked,” the Link replied.
Son of a bitch. “Where is she?” I asked the Net.
“New Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, California. She is walking.”
I marched out of my place and hailed a pod. I’d track her down, even if it meant sorting through all the tourists on S.F. Island.
Before I was airborne, I had a better idea. I rerouted the vehicle to Monica’s apartment.
I made it to her front door and pressed my thumb against the lock. If my guess were right, Mom hadn’t bothered to remove my DNA signature from the lock’s database. She was terrible about those sorts of details.
“Monica is not at home,” the door said.
So far so good. It wouldn’t have spoken at all if it hadn’t recognized me.
“I need to get in.”
“Please wait,” it said. I knew it was placing a call to Mom. I also knew the Link wouldn’t put it through. A door query was too routine to override the block. “Monica does not respond.”
“She’s taking a little retreat,” I said. “She asked me to look after the apartment for a day or so.”
This apparently satisfied the door’s guard program. It unlocked.
I meandered through the rooms. I hadn’t been past the front room for two months, but the place was mostly the same. Other people might order their domiciles to redecorate themselves every week, but not Monica. Once in a while she’d move a wall, to create a more open feel, but she’d left things more or less alone ever since she’d moved out of the larger place we’d shared during my childhood. The Japanese rice paper scroll above the toilet had been there so long that it would have disintegrated had not the housekeeping programs restored it periodically.
I brewed some tea and strolled onto the balcony. A hummingbird stole nectar from a trumpet vine blossom not five feet away. The bird’s ruby throat shifted momentarily to match the brassy tone of the flower — the city parks and rec department sure liked those chameleonic hummers — then the little thing rose up, perched in midair to regard me, and whizzed off so fast I couldn’t track it.
Mom had generated the original of that trumpet vine when I was ten. What was that creator’s name? Oh, yeah. Josef Rautiainen, one of the first Finnish horticultural maestros. Her hero.
Something about the apartment was wrong. The tea grew lukewarm while I puzzled it out.
I was drawn into the master bedroom. Gradually, by instinct, my gaze drifted to the large montage picture frame opposite the bed. Scenes of Mom’s life filled the rectangles and ovals. I located the two portraits of her parents — one showing them in advanced middle age, just before the immortality threshold was reached; another of them restored to youth, as they looked on the day their ark left for Proxima Centauri. There were wedding shots of their parents, for whom nanotech didn’t arrive in time. My great uncle, my mom’s old friend Glorie, Monica herself at a university graduation and at tourist sites across the solar system — they were all here.
But where was the picture of me on my first set of roller skates? And the one of her nursing me when I was two months old?
I passed into the dining room. She’d always kept a drawing that I’d done at age six fastened to the food exchanger. She’d been amused by the artwork’s scatological humor — I’d just figured out for the first time that the food the dining table created for us was a recycled version of what we put in the toilet.
No drawing. Not believing my eyes, I rushed into the workout room. I stepped on the mat and said, “Run routine thirty-seven.”
A virtual of a svelte woman in a leotard appeared at the edge of the mat and began a regimen of exercises. I stared at her blankly. Routine thirty-seven should have been the recording of me, as a teenager, running through an entirely different set of calisthenics. Mom used to play it back quite often.
I stalked through the apartment, scanning right and left. I didn’t have to search through much. Monica didn’t like clutter; she knew she could always call up an object from its scan if she wanted it.
Nothing. Not a trace, not a single piece of evidence to show that she’d ever had a daughter.
That bitch. After all that talk she’d spouted at friends and relatives about how long she’d waited, about how exhaustively she’d searched the catalogs to find just the right sperm culture, and how she never would have gotten permission to have me if the Cassiopeia colony hadn’t opened up, prompting the policymakers to rescind the birth moratorium for her age group.
She couldn’t even wait until I was dead to erase me from her life.
I kept down the bubble that was trying to work its way up my esophagus. I relaxed my fingers, but they kept curling into fists. Mom was going to have quite a reception waiting when she got back.
“Good evening, Monica,” said my door. “You have visitors.”
I took two steps back toward the elevator. I had dreaded this moment ever since Ellen and I had confirmed that Cheryl had taken the bait. My heart pounded, threatening to bruise the inside of my rib cage.
“Shield at level ten,” I said.
Normally I maintain my personal body shield on level two — just enough to keep gnats and flies from getting in my face. I don’t like setting it so high that it stops bullets; the feedback makes me feel as if I’m moving through molasses. But I couldn’t walk in there unprotected.
I pressed my thumb to the lock and shoved the door inward.
A body dangled from my chandelier, noose tight around her neck, blue tongue protruding from her mouth. Her jeans were wet at the crotch where the bladder had voided during strangulation.
It was not Cheryl. My offspring sat in a hammock chair at the far side of the living room.
“Hi, Mom,” she said sweetly.
Cheryl rocked gently to and fro. Behind her the window broadcast a panoramic sweep of tropical island beach, dotted with coconut palms and bougainvillea. I recognized the flowers as a hybrid designed by Maestro Nathaniel Martin. I’d always hated the maestro’s bizarre color combinations. I hated hammock chairs. Cheryl knew those things.
Something was odd about her looks, something I couldn’t quite pin down. But I was too agitated to dwell on it.
I scowled at her friend in the noose. “Any others around?”
“Just Jacques.”
I raised an eyebrow. She pointed at the closet.
I opened the door. The body of a man flopped onto my carpet, so stiff that he bounced like a mannequin and so brittle that he shattered three fingers. Frost rained out of his curly hair like a massive case of dandruff.
“Yesterday I called him a cold son of a bitch,” Cheryl said. “So he decided to prove me right.”
I checked the temperature coding for the closet, and found it set at minus 200°C. I ordered it back to normal. I didn’t need a goddamn deep freeze in my home. Hadn’t since nanotech had eliminated the need to store food.
“Oh, don’t do that, Mom. He wants to stay dead the whole twenty-four hours.”
I frowned, puzzled until I recalled that if a body is essentially intact but in a continually lethal environment — hanging from a noose and standing in a deep freeze would certainly qualify — the nanodocs hold off on repair until either the circumstances change or, at the twenty-four hour mark, they abandon the body and generate a new one from the person’s latest scan. I suppose it could annoy Suicidals to go to all the trouble of killing themselves only to wake up a few minutes later.
“That’s his problem,” I retorted, and stepped over the corpsicle.
“Mom. You’re so brusque.”
It took concentration, but I made my next comment even more curt and dismissive — trying to play my role. “Don’t tell me you recycled the gun? Couldn’t you and your friends have used it on each other for target practice?”
“Oh, Mom, that’s old. Jacques and I used to do that back in dorm days.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Is there something I can do for you today? Or are you going to keep cluttering up my apartment?”
“Sorry about that,” she said, and shrugged. “It’s day twenty-nine. When a person’s got so few hours to live, what’s wrong with raising a little hell?” She rocked the hammock chair until the ropes creaked in the hook.
“Give me a break, Cheryl. If you had any intention of following through with this suicide petition, you’d be off somewhere all alone, and you’d stop bothering those of us who have lives to conduct.”
“Who have you been talking to? Dr. Branson? That sounds like her.”
“Ellen has helped me realize what I should have done with you a long time ago. I’ve decided to take her advice.”
I squinted at her, and finally pinned down what seemed strange about her looks. She wasn’t wearing the morph she’d favored lately. She’d gone back to the one I had most often given her during childhood, the one which I suppose qualified most as her own. She hadn’t used it much over the years.
“Dammit, Monica,” she said, practically spitting out the comment. “I mean it this time.”
“What is so bad about life, Cheryl? Why do you want to die?”
She stared as if I were crazy. “What’s not wrong? The planet’s overpopulated. The rules have all been around for hundreds of years. A nobody like me can’t make a place in the world.”
“You were eight years into an apprenticeship. You were making headway.”
“C’mon, Mom. It was interior decorating. The only reason I got as far as I did was that no one could tell when I did a bad job. Sort of like therapy.”
“It was something you stuck to. It was a sign of maturity. You can’t expect to get to master if you don’t stick with something.”
“Right. Get to master. What are the averages now? Thirty years of apprenticeship, fifty years as a journeyman, and then being a master doesn’t mean jackshit unless you’re so outstanding and kiss so much ass that your peers declare you an adept or a maestro. What the hell do eight years matter?”
“It’s the longest you have ever lasted,” I snapped.
Tears began to swim in the corners of her eyes. “You act like I mean as much to you as a turd you grunted out in the woods a hundred years ago. You don’t care if I do it, do you? You brought me into this fucked-up world and now you won’t even help me slide out. I’m glad I killed you!”
All I wanted was to stop here, and take her in my arms. But I forced the words out, though I was so cotton-mouthed they ripped my throat. “You’re right. I don’t care. I’ve given up, Cheryl. I hope you do it. I’ve made arrangements with the Reproduction Review Board. They qualified me for a new baby.”
Cheryl blinked through her tears. The hammock chair ceased swaying and quivered to a stop. She stared at me open-mouthed. “You can’t do that. Nobody gets more than one kid these days.” The sarcasm and stridency had left her voice.
“Sure I can,” I said. “Now that my request is on file, if you’re archived any time before you turn a hundred years of age, I can get reproductive dispensation. You’ll be categorized as an abortion.”
I waited for her reaction. I hadn’t raised my voice, and now I stood calmly, maintaining my stern glare, holding back the shuddering in my bones much like the crew of the Enola Gay must have poised while their bomb plummeted toward Hiroshima.
She didn’t speak. She sat there wide-eyed, gulping air, tears streaming down her cheeks. Finally she whispered a single word, so softly I couldn’t hear her.
I thought nothing was happening, until I noticed a faint, bitter-almond undertone to the aroma of sea salt and hibiscus wafting from the window. “What’s that odor?” I asked. Suddenly my limbs sprouted lead weights.
“Cyanide,” Cheryl said in an utter monotone. “I’ve got my filters set for it. How about you?”
Of course I didn’t, because setting one’s filters to that degree removes all scents from the air. I hadn’t worried about poisons, since the nanodocs can usually render them harmless before they cause any suffering. But cyanide, as I recalled too late, is so fast that it’s easier for the little machines to let a person die, wait for the air to clear, and then revive the corpse.
“So long, Ma,” Cheryl said as stars flashed behind my eyes. Their light filled my vision, leaving me blind as my knees crashed to the floor. I was out before my head struck.
I woke up to the hiss of steam. Groaning, I rolled over to search for the source of the sound.
It was Jacques. He was enveloped in a cloud of mist. No doubt his docs were accelerating the thaw.
I scanned the room. Cheryl was gone, leaving her “friends” behind.
The first thing I did was toss the hanged girl over the balcony. Jacques followed, fingers and all. I didn’t give a hoot what the neighbors thought of bodies on the lawn.
Then I sat down, right on the carpet, too drained to make it to a chair. The shuddering started.
I’d done it. Dr. Branson would be proud of me. I’d called Cheryl’s bluff.
If it were a bluff.
The shuddering turned into sobbing. The tears burst out of me like rivers. My throat felt as if I’d swallowed thistles. I grabbed the end of the carpet and tried to wipe my face, but all that did was soak the tassels. I cried until I couldn’t breathe, and then I cried some more.
When I could finally stand up, and later, when I could finally walk, I stumbled into my bedroom. I recoded the picture frame on the nightstand to the scene I’d kept there for the past half century or so: my daughter, blowing out the candles of her birthday cake as she turned four years old.
Earth is glorious from a hundred miles up. At least, I’ve always thought so. Especially when I’ve exited my pod, told the craft to return to the planet, and I can just float there, suspended above that big blue sphere with nothing but a body shield, a cartridge of oxygen, and my surfboard to keep me company.
This was one vista I’d never shared with anyone, not even Jacques or Giselle. Oh, they knew about Earth surfing. After all, it had been a fad for centuries. Jacques had even told me about the portable scanner I could use to record and transmit my cusp-of-death configuration to the Net, so that when I was reconstituted my new body would remember as much of the emotional high of the experience as possible. The two of them indulged in the sport as often as I.
But never with me. This was my own, my favorite, my private means of suicide.
I hadn’t activated the scanner this time. Why should I record experiences that weren’t going to be plugged into a new body? This was it.
Oregon and the western coast of North America had just emerged from the terminator. Morning, the thirtieth day. If my eyesight were good enough, I could’ve spotted my mom down there.
Not that Monica mattered. She hadn’t answered my Link call when I arrived up here. She really didn’t care.
“Access suicide petition,” I murmured.
The Net’s clear tenor voice responded with shocking speed. “Suicide petition active. Day thirty. Upon your confirmation, your nanodocs will be disengaged and your scan will be transferred to archival storage.”
Fog shrouded the Golden Gate. The jet stream poured its usual funnel of rain clouds across Puget Sound. The Willamette Valley warmed to the rays of the newly risen sun. I’d lost sight of Portland as dawn had doused the lights of the city. Now it hid in the greens and browns of the continent, as if it didn’t exist at all.
What was one city in the history of a planet five billion years old? What was one more woman in the miasma of the human race?
No one would miss me. Just tag me as a fetus, aborted in its two hundred forty-ninth trimester. A statistic. Check me off the list — it’s the only way left for humanity to make room for new folks, not counting spewing them into the colony worlds.
So big a planet. So little a me.
“Do you confirm?” asked the disembodied voice.
My surfboard itched for the press of my Velcro-soled boots. My mind filled with the memory of the heat glowing just outside my shield, the Earth looming below, larger and larger. No matter how many times I do it, the anticipation of death sends the tingle down my spine like ultimate sex, as dependable as a narcotic. And then there’s the cool bliss of the Big White Light.
I wonder if there’s a God? Is St. Peter pissed off at how few people have been streaming through those pearly gates lately?
Hey, Pete, here I come. Don’t be lonely.
“Confirm petition,” I said.
“Petition granted. Your nanodocs have been disengaged and your scan has been archived. Permanent suicide is now your option.”
I licked my lips and took my stance on the board. With those ominous words, I had become the proverbial acrobat, treading the tightrope without a net. Sweat pooled at the end of my nose, prevented from dropping off by the proximity of my shield.
I aimed the board so that the tip obscured my view of Oregon. Too bad I couldn’t target my mother’s apartment — not that anything solid would make it far enough to create an impact crater. I wondered if she were awake yet. Wasn’t much chance she’d stayed up late thinking about me.
So much ocean down there. The amniotic fluid of the whole planet.
My eyes widened. I cued the Net. “Access Reproduction Review Board database. Do you have a birth request from Monica Taylor, I.D. 555-94-1830-66-291?”
“Negative. No such request on file.”
That sneaky bitch. She’d actually had me believing it.
Did it make any difference that she was bluffing? I was still up here, at the upper reaches of the atmosphere. I still had a decision to make.
Maybe I could hold off for a few weeks. With my docs out of commission, I could apply to become a Christian Scientist or a member of the Society of Mortals. Giselle had done it once. She’d said it was the most exciting period of her life, knowing she could really croak at any time, even by accident.
Mom would be left wondering exactly when I’d actually cash in. Or when I’d strike next. Or—
Who was I kidding? I was talking about only one thing here. Life was rearing its fuzzy little head in front of my carefully painted vision. I’d lost the moment. The worst part of it was, if I couldn’t do it now, under these circumstances, when could I?
Probably never.
“Erase petition,” I said, sighing. “Reactivate docs and retrieve scan.”
“Acknowledged.”
I’d always thought I would do it someday. I always thought it was just a matter of time. Suddenly all those six thousand temporary suicides seemed like some hoary old game, a behavior based on a false assumption about myself.
I had no idea where to go from here. I didn’t really like it. But I knew who I had to ask for advice. I had a hint I could reach her now.
I activated the Link. “Mom?” I asked.
Her voice came through quietly and clearly, unaccompanied by a visual. “I’m here.”
Her hoarse, strained tone put an uncontrollable quiver into my smile. “Mom, can we talk?”
“Yes. If you’ll let Ellen be there later on.”
An image came into my head of Monica staying up through the night, pacing, asking the Net every five seconds if I’d cancelled the petition, unblocking the Link the instant I did so. My throat ached with a sweet, powerful tightness.
“Get some rest, Mom. I’ll be there soon. I’ve got a couple of things to do first.”
“I’ll be here.”
I smiled wryly at the big, beautiful planet that had given me so much shit, and would give me lots more. Only a crazy woman would go back. Sighing, I activated the scanner. Aiming the surf board at the night-shrouded Pacific, I glided into the atmosphere. I made one hell of a meteor.
And within minutes, I was reborn.