The Future, Imperfect: Short Stories Read online

"I'm wearing a vest. And I'm fast." To prove it, she drew her gun before they even had time to react.

  "How'd you do that?" the one with the knife asked, profit forgotten.

  Kenna shrugged, her weapon trained on the one who appeared to be the leader. "I'm good. Now I suggest you all go home like obedient children."

  "You'd better listen to him." The youths turned their attention to the new voice, and Kenna kicked the knife from the hand of the one nearest her. With the odds less in their favor, the kids ran.

  Kenna returned her weapon to the holster. "Thanks."

  "You didn't need much help — you sure drew that stun gun fast," the stranger said, grinning.

  Kenna stared at him. He was a big man, with reddish glints in his wavy dark hair. She could swear she'd never seen him before, and yet there was something familiar about that grin. Perhaps he had once worked for Softec.

  "Seems you gotta be fast here in the burbs," she said.

  The stranger looked her up and down. "You Ken?" Kenna nodded. "I thought so. Sebastian did a good job describing you. I'm Alexis." He extended one big hand and Kenna took it.

  "Nice to meet you."

  Together they walked the rest of the way to the bar, west of the empty supermarket. The words "Star Video" were still legible above the door, although the neon letters were long gone. The original door was gone too, replaced by what looked liked a complete wall and door arrangement from another building, cut to size and nailed in place over what had probably once been a glass front.

  Alexis saw her examining the shopfront. "Frank still has some renovations to do," he said with that oddly familiar grin.

  She chuckled and pushed open the door. "No kidding."

  "Have the local brew," he said, following her in. "It's as good as anything the zones have to offer."

  They each got a bottle and sat down in a booth. He took a swig from his and scrutinized her. "Where did you learn to pull a roaster so fast? I thought weapons were restricted in the corporate zones."

  "I worked as a security guard while I was studying bioengineering." At least she could still think on her feet, but it was unfortunate Alexis had seen her in action. She took a long draught of the beer. He was right, it was very good, with a refreshing bitterness.

  "And how did you lose your corporate ID?" he asked.

  Kenna shrugged. "I guess I made it too obvious how fed up I was."

  "But corporation life is a privilege, not something to be fed up about."

  "Then what are you doing here?" Kenna asked aggressively.

  Alexis tossed his head and laughed. "Hey, Ken, let's get this straight: I'm the one doing the interviewing."

  "Okay then, interview me." Kenna leaned back in the booth, gazing at him expectantly.

  They talked for a while, watching each other warily. The big man grilled her. She wasn't making any mistakes that she could see, but she had the feeling she wasn't convincing him either.

  Alexis too leaned back and closed his eyes briefly, pinching the skin on the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Kenna stared at him, an impossible hunch blooming in her mind. She remembered the grin that had seemed so strangely familiar, the way he tossed his head, and now this, the way he pinched the bridge of his nose. The gestures were hers, and the grin — the grin was Max's. Could she be sitting across from the morph she had come to find? The only way to know for sure would be to uncover the datalink field at the bottom of his spine, and she couldn't exactly start pawing under his shirt.

  Alexis rose. "Excuse me. I need to use the john."

  Kenna watched Alexis wind his way through the crowd, heading for the men's room. She was losing her touch — she shouldn't have stared. But would the tech terrorists really send someone using the morph to interview her? It was much too valuable a weapon for such everyday tasks.

  "Okay, let's go," he said when he got back. He guzzled his beer and stood waiting for her. She got up and followed him out of the bar.

  Just outside the door, two pairs of hands grabbed her upper arms. They knew.

  Faster than her captors could react, she shook them off and bolted behind the old supermarket. She cut across the yard of an abandoned house to a side street and darted a look behind. Two dark figures pelted after her, Alexis on their tail. One pulled a weapon, but she was losing them. Then she started losing herself.

  It began like a hint of voices in the back of her mind, an awareness of presence, becoming more and more pronounced, bits of memory laced with personality flitting through her consciousness. Slowly the voices got louder, but they weren't voices, not really, they were images and impulses and opinions, all competing for control. She could no longer feel the impact of her feet on the rutted pavement, no longer see the shapes of the buildings she passed, no longer perceive the stretch of muscles in her thighs, distracted as she was by the presence in her head, like a fog. She tried to force herself to keep running, just maintain movement, the simple motor function, but her concentration was shattering. She broke down in mid-stride and stumbled, and they were on her.

  * * * *

  As Kenna slowly regained consciousness, she noticed with relief that the babble of competing identities had left her head. Perhaps her breakdown had not been a true identity scramble. If that was the case, she had to get back to her body before the real thing hit her.

  She opened her eyes, and her heart contracted.

  Max.

  Kenna squeezed her eyes shut, rolling into a ball of pain. "Don't do this to me," she said, her voice breaking. She hated her own weakness.

  "Kenna."

  His voice. It wasn't fair. Why were they torturing her this way?

  "Kenna, look at me."

  Max's voice speaking her real name. How did they know who she was? "No."

  "I thought you'd be happy to see me again."

  "You? You're not Max. Max is dead. Who are you?"

  "But I am Max. Part of Max at least."

  She opened her eyes again but didn't turn over. Instead, she stared at a crack in the wall thirty centimeters above her head. The room was windowless and small and resembled a large closet. A certain moldering smell suggested they were in a cellar.

  "Kenna --"

  "Stop it!" She took a deep breath. "Okay, so you're the missing morph unit," she said to the wall. "And you have some shadow memory from Max. But you're really one of these rebels."

  "No."

  "Who then?"

  "The missing morph unit."

  "God damn!" Kenna sat up and faced him — it. Max's intense blue-green eyes stared back at her, and his thick, autumn-colored hair was tied back in a braid that went almost to his waist. "Aw, fuck." She dropped her face in her hands. They were women's hands, her own hands. She had changed into an image of herself.

  She raised her head and stared at her hands. "How did I get the way I am?"

  "Before you regained consciousness, you morphed."

  "Recovering from the identity scramble." She looked up, and the morph gave her Max's quirky smile. A smile she thought she'd never see again. It felt like her stomach was being eaten by acid. "Can't you change?" she said, turning her head. "I can't deal with this."

  There was several minutes' silence. Kenna could feel the air between her and the morph unit grow warm.

  "Is this better?"

  She looked up to find a reflection of herself sitting on the chair next to the bed, with her short black hair and brown eyes and long legs. The clothes it had worn as Max were big on it as Kenna, but not much. They had been pretty similar in size.

  "Very funny."

  "I thought so," the morph said in her own sarcastic tone of voice. It was freaky.

  "So are you going to tell me who you really are?"

  Her reflection shrugged. "A composite personality."

  Kenna stared at the morph. "And that's all? No brain upload?"

  "None."

  "You've got to be kidding me."

  "Nope."

  Kenna got up and began to pace
the small room. "This is incredible. You function independently."

  The morph nodded.

  "Your consciousness, your intelligence consists solely of bits and pieces of shadow memory from different agents?"

  "Well, that and very advanced bioengineering."

  "A DNA enhanced neural network. With a mind of many others."

  "I'm crushed." Her own merciless grin taunted her, a mirror of herself. But when it came right down to it, she was a mirror of herself too.

  "Stop that," Kenna said.

  "Would you like me to change back to Max? I'd be very happy to."

  "No!"

  The morph grinned again. "Ah, but when I see you, I want to very much. I have a hard time bottling his wishes."

  Kenna shook her head. "But how could a morph unit be sitting here talking to me without an agent controlling it?"

  "I don't know."

  "What happened?"

  "I woke up, like you just now."

  "After an identity scramble?"

  "After Max's identity scramble."

  She sat down hard on the only available chair. "You're the morph Max was in when he died?"

  "I think I must be, since I have memories of it."

  "But they were never able to save Max's mind. It was a complete crash. Softec was going to destroy that morph unit." She could feel her throat constricting, the threat of tears at the back of her eyes.

  The morph shrugged, but the look it gave her was sympathetic, its voice low. "Apparently they didn't. How else can you explain that I can remember the Hypersystems case, remember losing my mind, remember your expression as you turned to me?"

  Kenna swallowed and clenched her fists in her lap. "I can't."

  "Kenna, I'm sorry." The morph scooted its chair over to hers, took her in its arms, thin, muscular, female arms, and pushed her head onto its shoulder. Its appearance was hers but its actions were Max's. She wanted to think of it as Max, couldn't help thinking of it as Max, but she had to keep from thinking of it as Max. She lifted her head from the morph's shoulder.

  "So the terrorists didn't steal you." She rubbed her eyes with thumb and forefinger.

  "No, I left. When I heard about the tech rebels freeing technology, I figured that was the place for me. Seeing as I'm technology. And freedom sounds like a good option." The morph grinned. His grin. In her face.

  Kenna gave a shuddering sigh. "I don't believe this."

  It touched her hand, a light touch and then gone, like Max used to do. "Shall we join the others? They'd like to talk to you."

  They stood, and the morph took her elbow. "Was my identity scramble natural, or did you give it to me?" Kenna asked.

  "We gave you a mild one. You recovered easily."

  "Well, thanks for making it mild." She couldn't keep the sarcasm out of her voice, but the morph just smiled.

  They entered the next room, a pair of artificial twins, where a motley group of half-a-dozen tech rebels were gathered. This room also was windowless, light provided by a bare bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. Both Sebastian and the barrel-chested burb boss were there. In the corner, a high-quality screen took up a fourth of one wall, indicating a more advanced system than she would have expected in the burbs. A young woman sat at the console to the right of the screen, surrounded by peripherals Kenna couldn't immediately identify.

  "Where are we anyway?" she asked the room at large.

  "We can't tell you that," a short, dumpy man replied. He didn't look much like a dangerous terrorist to her. "You're our prisoner."

  "Yeah, right. I forgot." Kenna looked around at the others, mostly young and all dressed in dark clothes. "So what do you want from me?"

  "Your morph and your mind," said a woman leaning back in a decrepit chair.

  "Okay, the morph I can understand," Kenna said. "But why my mind?"

  "You've worked for the corporations, and we can use any knowledge we can get."

  "So it will be easier for you to steal their technology?"

  "You call it stealing, we call it freeing," Gabe said with a smile.

  Kenna laughed shortly. "And what about intellectual property rights?"

  An Asian youth who had not yet spoken barked out, "Look at you. Your job is stealing technology from other corporations, right?"

  "Not anymore."

  "Tim, lull it," the dumpy one said.

  The young woman who had spoken before stood up and began to pace in front of Kenna. "All we want to do is improve life in the burbs. But we can't do that with dollars. And we can't get units without hi-tech."

  "Develop your own."

  "That's ripe. With what laboratories? With what training? Corporate monopolies control the universities."

  "There must be techies in the burbs who've lost their IDs and could train people."

  The woman looked at the others with a wry smile and Gabe spoke up. "What do you think we are?"

  "Oh."

  "We need you for current information."

  "And what if I don't give it to you?"

  "Ve have vays of making you talk," the dumpy one said in a sinister voice, and the others broke out in friendly laughter.

  Kenna looked around the room at these people who had about as much resemblance to terrorists as her boss David did. Less. "I don't think so. It would be better for you if you let me go."

  "Why?"

  "I'm equipped with a tracer that I'm supposed to activate when I find the terrorist hideout."

  Sebastian chuckled. "Wow, we've graduated to terrorists!"

  "Why are you telling us this?" the morph said — in Max's voice. While she hadn't been looking, he must have transformed again. A hand came to rest at the back of her neck, like Max used to do, and she leaned into it instinctively, unable to stop herself. It was so unfair. She'd lost Max once; she didn't want to lose him again.

  Kenna closed her eyes and considered the question, enjoying the feel of the hand. "You look pretty harmless to me, not like terrorists at all. If you let me go, I won't tell Softec anything about you."

  "Harmless, she calls us!" Sebastian said. "You hear that, hombres?"

  "How do we know that you haven't already activated the tracking device?"

  The woman sitting at the screen checked one of her peripherals. "She hasn't."

  "Then how do we prevent her?"

  "There's always the scrambler," Tim said.

  Kenna started up, away from the hand. Her artificial body reacted much like the real thing in emotional and stress situations. And at the mention of another identity scramble, it broke out in a sweat. "Please don't do that to me again."

  The Max-morph took her arm. "We may not have a choice."

  "How soon after she activates it would they be able to find her?"

  The stirrings of sympathy she had begun to feel for them fled. Before they could make their decision, Kenna made hers.

  "She activated the tracer," the rebel at the console said.

  "Shit."

  A small device pressed into the back of her head. "Sorry about this," the Max-morph murmured. "We'll be in touch." He gave her a quick, hard kiss on the mouth, while Kenna once again quietly lost her mind.

  * * * *

  She stared out of the big picture window at the Seattle cityscape. With no smog, the view from the Softec Tower was fabulous, the new buildings between Pill Hill and the Space Needle gleaming like a promise of prosperity. The ruins of the burbs were beyond the hills and Lake Washington, invisible. She was glad to be back.

  "What caused your identity scramble?" David asked.

  Kenna returned to the chair on the other side of his desk and sat down. "They have a scrambler, and they used it on me when they noticed I'd sent a trace."

  "How did they notice that?"

  "They have some pretty advanced monitoring equipment."

  David tapped his pen on the shiny desktop. "This is worse than we thought. But you're sure they didn't steal the morph?"

  "I'm sure."

  Her bos
s got up and began to pace the length of the gray plush carpet. "Well, if you didn't see it, another arm of these terrorists still could have stolen the morph."

  Kenna shrugged, silent, lying as little as possible. Protecting the rebels. She was protecting the rebels.

  "Do you think they're capable of that kind of theft?"

  "Hard to say. They're obviously clever enough to get into the corporations if they have a scrambler."

  David nodded. "They have a scrambler and they know enough to recognize morphs. It sounds to me like they have the unit."

  "Possible."

  He stopped in front of her chair. "We want you to go back to the burbs."

  She'd been afraid of this. She resisted the temptation to clench her hands in her lap. "But I've almost reached my limit."

  "You still have over a week, even remaining in your unit 24/7. We need you to identify the rebels you met. Besides, you won't be solo this time."

  "The rebels will be more careful now."

  David shrugged. "All you have to do is find them, and we'll get you out of the burbs again. Your partner will take care of the rest."

  "Do you have someone in mind?"

  "We're considering sending Rhea with you."

  Rhea. The woman for the dirty jobs. Among the morph agents, it was rumored she was an outright assassin.

  Kenna nodded. Her mouth was dry.

  * * * *

  "Welcome home, Kenna," the house greeted her when she returned. "You have been gone quite some time." It almost sounded relieved — and perhaps it was. If a morph unit could take pieces of shadow memory to form an independent identity, a house might even be able to develop affections.

  Kenna smiled. "Yes, I have, haven't I?"

  She found herself wishing she could tell the house what happened, confide in it even. After Max's death, she had built such a thick wall around herself that most of her friends had given up on her; the house was one of the few friends she had left.

  But she had no idea who might be monitoring her conversations with her house.

  Kenna went into the bedroom, stripped off the dark suit and took a shower. As she pulled a long sweatshirt over her leggings, the house announced that she had a call coming in.

  She padded out to the big screen in the living room. "Okay. Put it through."