If he said he understood why they were, he would have been lying. But he knew that it was so all the same, and there was no shortage of time alone that night to wonder on it.
The Memphis hyper could be accessed from Christopher’s entry terminal, or even, in a limited way, from an ordinary graphics station—just as DIANNA could be accessed by a lowly DBS phone in a pinch. But it was best accessed from a hyper booth, with its desk-sized flat-table display, wraparound sound, digital holo tank, and full voice command.
The only hyper booths in the complex which were on the Memphis net were those belonging to the Testing Section, on the first floor of Building 16. There were twenty of them, and they were almost always busy. Besides Testing’s own staff of verifiers, the booths served a parade of outsiders recruited to test the hands-off interface or wring out the stacks in their particular specialty.
Only the fact that it was a Sunday gave Christopher hope of catching a booth free. Had he waited until Monday, he would have had to settle for using his entry terminal. But waiting did not seem like a good idea. Saturday night’s chill had persisted into Sunday, with Jessie vanishing without explanation soon after rising. He stayed in the house and spied on her, monitoring her skimmer’s locator and Jessie’s family subaccount long enough to follow her to LifeCare and see a health services charge appear.
Then guilt took over, and he left himself, partly to avoid being there when Jessie returned, as least until he had satisfied the one request he could cheerfully accommodate. He took the tram in and walked to Building 16 from the stop, risking the bright poison sun after three days of the gray clouds, wind, and soaking rains of Tropical Storm Jennifer.
“Staff. Any booths open?” he asked, waggling his identification badge at the scheduler.
“Sure,” the woman said without looking up. “Three of them. Take your pick.”
He settled in 11, waited until the door glided shut, and asked for Biographical.
“Ready.”
“Find Jessica Alexis Cichuan.”
The hyper’s response was ordinarily instantaneous, but the table remained black for a long two seconds. Then the system chirped and the results came up:
. JUANITA INEZ CICHUAN, changed to JESSICA ALEXIS CICHUAN April 9, 2085 FHS Registry #TD-0943-3912 b. Brownsville, Texas, 06:26 CDT, April 9, 2070
• Mother: Dolores Maria Cichuan (deceased)
• Father: Duane Allen Kent
• Siblings: Luis Cichuan
“Huh,” Christopher said in surprise. “She changed her name. Find English equivalents, Juanita, Inez.”
JUANITA —>> pet form of Spanish JUANA
JUANA —>> Spanish of • JANE • JOAN
INEZ —>> Spanish of AGNES
“Huh,” Christopher said again. A butterfly named Joan Agnes. No wonder— “Return. More.”
END OF THREAD
“Visual.”
NOT AVAILABLE
Frowning, Christopher opened the door and walked back down the corridor to the Testing desk. “Are all the bio stacks up?” he asked.
“For what population?”
“Contemporary.”
The woman turned to her terminal. “They’re all up.”
“You’re sure?”
“Unless they’re lying to me. Problem?”
“I guess not,” Christopher said uncertainly. He retreated back to booth 11 and cocooned himself there with his doubts. Briefly, he considered looking up Jessie’s parents, but decided not to. It’ll be hard enough pretending I don’t know one family secret. He heard himself telling Jessie, “They know your name and when and where you were born. Sorry, that’s it.” No comfort there. Better to say nothing. Better to lie—
“Find Loi Lindholm.”
The full expanse of the table was filled by the response. There was a still photo, life size, flattering. From San Francisco, maybe two years ago—about the time I met her, he thought. Before she cut her hair short. Before the cheek tattoo. There was a lengthy biography, with her apprenticeship to Rolf Dannenberg highlighted. There was a list of Loi’s major sculpts, a partial list of her clients, an exhibition record. And there were thirty or more bullets noting where more information was available. A rich thread.
Looking at the picture, Christopher realized belatedly that while living in San Francisco, where self-definition by dress and demeanor were survival arts, Loi had stood out by being defiantly conventional. But since coming to Houston, as conservative a major city as remained in the United States, she had taken pains to be anything but conventional. The raked haircut. The hammered silver collar. The tattoo, a delicate thing of ink and silicone. The open trine, her young man on one arm, her young woman on the other.
Playing to her audience. Playing the iconoclast artist. Playing the Lady From the West. Give them a show. But looking at the picture, he also realized how much he preferred the way she had looked then to the way she looked now, and how little say he had had about the changes.
That was an unhappy thought, and he had had enough of those for one weekend.
“Clear,” he said, and the table blanked.
He tried to think about Jessie and what he could do. There were mechanisms for correcting errors, but this was not an error. Jessie had done nothing to earn her any larger place in the archives of her species. It was not a slight. It was the truth, but one she was poorly equipped to either overlook or accept.
It had not been a trivial request. She would not forget. It might be a few weeks before she would ask again, but she would ask again. It’s not fair, she had said. I don’t want to be forgotten.
But she would be. And Loi would not. Loi lived through her creations. A trick of transcendence, the artist creating the art, the art re-creating the artist.
Jessie would find no comfort in that. But if she looked, she would find a great deal of company. Within their circle of friends there were two, perhaps three, who would merit a longer notice in the hyper. The rest, himself included, were merely part of the census. This many born this day, that many died.
A lie invited—but he had no ammunition with which to lie. He racked his memory for details she had offered in conversation these last few months, and then gave up, knowing that to be caught in a lie would be worse than telling the truth. He would tell her matter-of-factly, and show her a dump of his own entry so that she would know she was not alone. Loi was an exception, was exceptional. As was William McCutcheon.
If it was painful, well, he knew what that felt like. He would help her grow through it. Pain was a pointed lesson in living, a reality check for the beclouded.
“Find Christopher Thomas McCutcheon.”
The entry was as it had been the first time he looked himself up in the hyper. He earned one extra line for being staff, one extra line for having had both donor and host mothers, lost one for having been content with his name, but otherwise it was a copy of Jessie’s, simple, short, and shallow.
He was pleased.
But only for a moment.
Then, perversely, he began to think about what was missing from the display. He had earned two degrees, in Salem’s grueling general studies program and Stanford’s comparatively easy Information Sciences. He had won a Hastings Award at sixteen, a songwriting contest at nineteen. He had signed a marriage contract and dissolved it. He had written an essay for the Oregonian, played guitar on KSFO’s Tunnel Visions. And more. A whole life, not just a moment of birth and a diagram of blood relations.