Fighting for the Future, page 14
Finally, a closed door—anonymous, utilitarian, but at the end of a long hallway. Kay stopped in front of the door and took Leanna's hands. "Behind this door is your mother's life's work. Everything she'd built, everything she hoped to leave behind. She knew what kind of a woman you'd become. She left you a gift. Your birthright."
Leanna opened the door and stepped inside. Kay stayed in the hallway.
As the door closed softly behind her, Leanna's eyes struggled to adjust to the dim light. No overhead lighting here. She was in a room, cool and dark. Dim light from some kind of phosphorescent fungus, punctuated with blinkenlights from a rack of technology that were embedded in—Leanna gasped—the entire back wall of the room was a softly undulating fleshy wall, enmeshed and wrapped up in the concrete structure, but veins of fungal threads glowed faintly below the mottled yellow-and-brown surface, looking like nothing so much as burnished leather. The lights came from a rack of memory chips, carefully placed and sealed behind a layer of climate-controlled glass. The power and data interfaces for the chips were buried somewhere in the fungal tissue of the wall itself.
With one shaking hand, and not knowing precisely why, Leanna reached out to lay her palm flat against the fungal wall.
As soon as her hand touched the fleshy surface of the wall, something broke open inside Leanna's mind. A short circuit, or a failed connection, or some rogue code fitfully lurking somewhere in the junction between her failing headware and the organic tissue it interfaced with. Whatever it was, it set off a chain reaction of jolts that caused her wetware to shudder and let loose a flood of data. Flashes of light blinded her, but also voices, soft whispers and shouts rising in volume and intensity until they were a discordant shriek. Leanna smelled vanilla, felt sandpaper under her fingertips, tasted the acrid bitterness of a half-burned meal. Memories rose up in her consciousness too quick to recognize, before dipping and falling back into the roiling soup of her breaking mind.
Then, one voice rose above all the others, deafening but clear. Her mother's voice. The letters her mother had sent her. Somehow, the sensations and hallucinations faded, and Leanna realized that something was blooming in her mind—all of the messages and information from her mother's letters, and the half-formed mental schema her brain had been trying to build up, walling off and encysting her mother's messages like a half-baked immune response.
Leanna fell to her knees, her hand pulling free from the fungal wall. Finally, silence. No more phantom sights or smells or sounds. Just the same dark room she'd been in.
Except something was different. Her mother was here. Standing in front of her, looking patient and kind and exactly as Leanna never remembered her. Even recovering the storm of sensations, Leanna knew this wasn't really her mother. Whatever this was, standing in front of her it, was somewhere between a hallucination and a vivid memory of something that had never happened.
"What do you want?" Leanna croaked. "You're dead, you know."
The phantom vision of her mother smiled sadly. "I know. Because you know. But I also know what you don't. I know why you're here."
"They said you needed me to finish your work?"
Her mother turned away, towards the fungus. "We'd done something impossible here, but that’s just biology. We saw how badly things had gone out there—and how bad they were going to get—and wanted to build a better world."
"Seems like everything's hunky-dory upstairs," Leanna said, still catching her breath.
"We weren't naive. We knew that generations to come might benefit from the sacrifice of those that came before, but without the pain it took to bring it into existence. We needed to be able to share our stories with the generations that followed. Not tall tales or stern warnings or laws bound up in ink and leather. To help our children avoid making the same mistakes that had doomed the world that came before."
"No. This is just more of the shit you put in the letters. I have other questions. No, just one question. Why?" Leanna finally asked. The one question she needed an answer to, the one she'd always needed to know, above all else. "Why did you leave? Why did you leave me behind?"
Her mother—the phantasmagoric, imaginary, painfully real version of her mother—gave her a beatific smile. "Honey, I was doing important things. The most important thing. I was making a better world. A better world for you. I didn't have time to be just a mother."
Leanna felt as though she'd been dropped from a great height and slammed into the earth. That answer was pure, unvarnished, and untouched by the self-deceptions and prevarications that a real person would have employed. It might have even been true.
"I'm done here. I need to leave."
The vision of Leanna's mother shimmered and reappeared in front of the door. "What's out there for you? The city is dying. All the cities are dying, no matter how hard they pretend they aren't. The planet is poisoned, Leanna. You either let it kill you, or you find a way to survive the poison. Take it in, let it sustain you. If it lets you thrive, it isn't poison anymore."
"That's your crusade, not mine."
"Haven't you always wondered what it meant to really be a part of a community? Haven't you always wondered if there was something more. If there was a family, a community, a tribe out there?"
Leanna almost broke down, then. It was true. Of course it was true. This wasn't her mother talking, it was her, herself. How could she deny the truths she lived with all her life? Something broke loose inside of her. She couldn't explain it, she didn't quite understand it, but she stopped.
"Fine. Tell me more."
Leanna's mother—or the solipsistic simulacra that her broken mind created to resemble her mother—explained. The giant mushrooms that dotted the valley floor, as it turns out, were all connected, and sprouted from a heavily engineered splice of the largest and oldest organism ever to grace the earth's surface—armillaria ostoyae, a miles-wide fungus, sampled with care from Oregon's Blue Mountains before they were leveled and strip-mined. What better partner than the hardiest and longest-lived thing that had ever existed. They gifted the fungus the same extremophile organelle. And like all fungi, it grew to link the ecosystem together, negotiating carbohydrate exchange between lichen and myco-heterotrophic plants and the various mushrooms and soil bacteria.
It did more than that. It helped everything grow and stitched them into a web. Shared resources. Shared survival. Shared sensations.
They had engineered a tangle of bioelectric nervous tissue into the fungus that had grown to underlie every inch of the valley floor. A biological network of massive proportions, ready to accept that most precious gift that the elders could give it: their own memories.
At the end of the lecture, Leanna's mother knelt down in front of her, as if to beg. "What we were building needed to be bigger than one person's lifespan. We recorded as many of their memories as they could get. The hardships. The suffering, the deaths. So many people died on the road before they even got here. If we can upload these precious memories into the mother fungus, they'll live on. The archaea and the fungus, they allow us to access those memories, relive the lessons of the past, and share it with the next generation. We need your help to finish that work, my darling."
Later—hours, days, it was hard to tell—Leanna stepped back up to the rack of memory chips. Had she made the decision? Had she chosen this path? She didn't remember anymore. It didn't seem like something she would have done. But that was before.
She placed the last chip back in its storage cradle. She'd seen everything. She'd lived everything. The years of pain and death and starvation. The stories passed down from mother to daughter for millennia. The heartache and disappointment and sheer existential dread as humanity went insane, looking at the prospect of climate change and catastrophe, and instead of stepping back, leaping headfirst towards utter annihilation.
One by one, Leanna had pulled every one of the chips into her own brain. She'd broken open every firmware security protocol in her own headware, and let the memories overwrite everything. The onboard storage: System software. Photos and audio files, the carefully-preserved digital detritus of a life. But not just the hardware storage. She'd cracked open the headware BIOS to rehearse the memory chips, replaying them in an endless loop through her hippocampus and amygdala, allowing her to crudely overwrite her own memories to make room for the elders'.
It was confusing. She'd wanted to go home before. She hadn't cared about this cause, before. She'd wanted to leave her mother in the past.
In some corner of her mind, Leanna still wanted to slip back into the network and reach her mind's eye out into that digital sea just one more time. But now, with dozens of lifetimes of memories now coursing through her skull, the only thing she knew for sure was that one life didn't mean much against the span of time.
Leanna—whoever that was—felt herself slipping away as the new memories coalesced and consolidated, taking over her own. Then, she found that she couldn't quite remember the details of who she was, or how she'd come to be here. But that didn't seem terribly important. She knew where she was, and what she was doing. And more important, she knew why.
Leanna stepped up to the mottled skin of the mother fungus once again and placed a palm on the leathery surface. It was better this time. Just a tingle like a tiny current of electricity running through her hand up and up through her body. She could feel the mother fungus. It knew what needed to happen as well as Leanna did. And a slit opened up in the surface of the fungus, just large enough for Leanna to climb into.
She felt the warm embrace of the mycelium all around her. She felt the pinpricks of questing fibers, and the gentle touch pulsing touch of the mother fungus as it drew her in, deeper and deeper, through the tangles and roots of the fungal growth, ever inward, towards the heart of everything. And as she was drawn in, Leanna felt a rush of connection, a sudden fractal expansion in her consciousness, as the memories that lived within her flooded out and back and through her, and knitted themselves into the fibers of the fungus running through every inch of the valley, entwined in the roots of every plant, and flitting in and out of contact with the quick-moving humans that tended to her roots.
Leanna was home.
The Robot Whisperer
Holly Schofield
Emilia heard the door bang as Kore entered her workshop. Dishes clattered on the side bench. "Be there in a minute, I just have to…" She let her voice fade. How could you fix a magnifying light when you needed to magnify it to see what you were doing? And her hands were trembling again. She set down the tiny screwdriver in frustration. She was too old for this. Too old for everything. And her calendar was blinking at her again.
"Come on, Mom, it's getting cold." More clattering. "Your tinkering can wait."
"You know, there was a day when I was considered more than a tinkerer." Emilia picked her way through the crowded stacks of old electronics gear to where Kore had laid out dinner, a lentil stew and a chicory latte, both freshly steaming from the collective's communal kitchens.
"You've still got it, no worries." Kore chuckled and gestured at the faded thank-you certificate on the wall. "All of the old-timers still have a crush on you." In the corner of the frame, bronzed by the late afternoon light, a small printed photo perched: Emilia on the day she'd arrived six decades ago. Mirrored sunglasses—retro even then—long black hair ponytailed with an ironic curl at the end. And her tight black clothing, so unsuited to the climate-changed heat of western British Columbia. The collective hadn't wanted to let her in. She represented everything wrong with city life—consumerism and fast fashion, high tech for the sake of high tech, environmentally detrimental housing and infrastructure, not to mention faith in capitalism and perpetual growth—everything the newly formed collective had sworn to reject.
"Tell me again about your arrival?" Kore held out the spoon. "And eat while you do."
Emilia gave her a flat look. When had child become parent?
Kore brushed back her hair and Emilia noticed the gray. Now in her sixties with fingers almost as arthritic as Emilia's, Kore taught the younger ones woodworking, all based on the collective's principle of "least tech necessary for the job." Kore had her place in the world, but Emilia's was slipping away.
The latte foam was shrinking, bubbles disappearing as if they'd never existed.
Coming here had been necessary but not easy. First, there had been her successful refuctoring of Regina's municipal budget—increased subsidized housing, reduced management perks, some other tiny adjustments to give more parity among salaries—followed quickly by pretend ransomware that had prevented immediate budget reviews. Then, the switcheroo of the deputy mayor's name and SIN number with similar ones belonging to a lifer in Kingston Penitentiary: that had been rad! The identity theft issues had been so intense the deputy mayor had to quit her job to deal with them; Emilia would have felt worse about it had the woman not been syphoning off funds for her Bahamian home.
It all might have remained undiscovered for a while, at least until next term's audits, but Emilia had slipped up irretrievably when she hacked into the mayor's video recordings of his meetings with the biggest of the local gang leaders. Somehow—she'd never known how—she'd left tracks behind as clear and as deep as an elk in winter snow. That had been the turning point: two nasty groups after her was one more than even she could handle.
It still made her shudder to recall her escape. First, the run through Regina's subway tunnels, then the long hitchhike to the suburbs, a night in someone's garage on the backseat of an illegal gas-engined Cadillac, followed by the theft of one of the newer, badass e-bikes and a tablet from a schoolyard. Her destination was "anywhere but Regina" so she headed onto the highway, turning west into the setting sun like the hero in some old-school western vid. Vancouver, eventually, she supposed, but she knew they had troubles—and gangs—of their own.
If she kept a dead-steady speed, the self-driving semis didn't know she was tucked up behind their taillights. She drafted a series of them for hours, past endless seared prairie destitute with withered crops and dead windbreaks. After nodding off once and nearly swerving for the ditch, she switched to a slower ancient one-ton truck but the human driver kept peering out the window back at her, brown face scrunched with concern, super-long hair blowing freakily backwards in the wind. Emilia dropped back a more reasonable distance and fixed her eyes on the tailgate for the next five hours—the flowery script, Chlorohaven, forever etched in her mind.
The bike's battery indicator yellowed after a while, then reddened. Finally, an e-charge station appeared where the highway swung down in the cleft of two mountains near Yoho Park. The self-driving vehicles kept going, of course, but the old truck swung in. Emilia cursed. No choice but to follow. The bike was almost out of juice.
She pulled into the farthest plug station and turned her back to the lean driver who swung down from the truck cab. She ignored her near-hypothermia and growling stomach. One thing at a time. The challenge here was to charge up without giving away the bike's ID and GPS. It had surely been reported and the automated highway patrols would flag it right away and intercept her. This highway didn't branch for a hundred klicks.
She yanked the charge cable from the bike's compartment and the tablet from where it had been pressing against her ribs. Using her body as a shield, she made the connections and flicked on the tablet. Scrolling code began and she lost herself in the flow, darting and diving and probing like a shark after prey.
"Engine trouble?" The driver's shout was followed by a friendly head tilt. How many minutes had passed? Emilia had gotten nowhere and her left foot was growing numb.
She angled her face away and shrugged.
"No money for juice? I can spot you a few bucks." The driver was coming closer, striding over the gravel, long gray hair puffing around a thin face with—uh oh—clever eyes.
Emilia's second shrug was brief as it could be without being rude. "No, thanks." Entering the driver's account data wouldn't help—the system would still flag the stolen bike. There must be a way.
A few more minutes of futile poking before she admitted it to herself. Without hours of time and a better tablet, even trapdoor access was closed to her and her tiny pocket toolkit. She wasn't going to be able to get in. There'd been no other human-driven traffic for hours. And those dark trees crowding in on all sides were spooky, even in daylight.
The driver still stood there, hands in jean pockets, a concerned look on their face.
Time for Plan B.
Cold fingers fumbling inside the bike's tiny side panel, it took several attempts with her penknife to score the charge cable enough to break it.
She held up the busted cable and forced a wry smile. "This bike's not going anywhere." She let some of her anxiety show. She could ask but it would be better if they offered. Syphoning juice off the truck would be slow and inconvenient for the driver but it would be untraceable to the bike.
"Hop in. My chariot awaits." They grinned, flung an arm wide, and gave an exaggerated bow.
"Not what I..." It would sure be nice to be out of the wind. Her eyes ached from unaccustomed long-distance views. And maybe food would be part of the equation. Emilia made a sudden decision. "That would be awesome."
By the time they reached the turnoff to Chlorohaven, just outside the aptly-named town of Hope, the driver had introduced themself as Dardee and told Emilia about life in the collective and how they took veggies all the way to Calgary this fall because mudslides had closed the highways into Vancouver and Chilliwack. How the collective was successful, but only to a point.
"We'll never be sustainable unto ourselves, not like the founders thought'd be possible back in the day. We get meds and other health tech from various places, and we deal with various governments and cities and corporations."
Emilia nodded, feeling surreal. The truck bore the earthy smell of raw potatoes and carrots, and a damp burlap sack squatted on the seat between them, next to the beeswax wrap that had held Dardee's lunch. The dashboard was a mashup of several styles and models of displays. An assemblage of gear that would have been punk if anything had post-dated the previous century but, no, it was all stale-tech, dials and gauges and thermostats. A day ago, she'd been in front of a TeeGore 764XC deking through encrypted software like a boss. Now, jouncing along the endless highway, e-bike bungee-corded to the rusty box, it was like she was stuck in a boot loop. She unzipped her jacket. At least it was warm.
