Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

Yes, this was it. This was what she had come back to Earth for.

“Ah-ha!” said a familiar voice.

Kata had just returned to her ship when she heard the exclamation, the sound of it harsh and horrible in the quiet.

“Do you want me to shoot him?” Drobo asked.

“No,” Kata said, with a sigh.

She knew him.

“Speaker on,” she said, and she heard the telltale click of the suit’s external speaker turning on. “Where’s your crew, Boris?”

“On the hunt,” the man replied. He wore a newer, sleeker version of Kata’s suit. “Looks like you’re due for a cleaning.” He ran a fingertip along the hull of her ship, drawing a line in the dust. And then a curve, and another curve. The letter “B”.

“Don’t you dare write your name on my ship,” she said, striding over and smacking his hand away. “What do you want?”

Boris glanced at her, then reached over to start the “o.”

She dropped the teddy bear, and smacked his hand away again—with her right hand, this time. Boris swore, shaking out his fingers. “Shit. Forgot about that metal arm.”

“I figured. Answer my question.”

“I’m under contract with the EJC.”

She was familiar with the acronym, but gave Boris a blank stare anyway.

“And you call yourself a human,” Boris said. “The Earth Justice Commission, Mausebär. They’re gathering evidence before the trials, to prove the sylph war was waged illegally.”

Kata began to feel her pulse in her throat and in her fingertips.

“And this brings you to Koloszvar… why ?” She used the Hungarian name for the city reflexively, though she was sure Boris wouldn’t know it. There had been one and a half million Hungarians living in Transylvania before the evacuation, yet this region had not been theirs.

And never would be again. Not anyone’s.

Boris shrugged. “A report of some outgoing transmission to the sylphs surfaced recently. Its origin code led us here.” He bent and picked up the teddy bear she had dropped. “I was going to ask if you had found anything that might be helpful to us. I would be willing to pay for it, of course.”

“Not as much as you would sell it to the EJC for, I’m sure,” she said, swallowing hard. Boris turned the bear over, looking at the stitching on its back and the worn patch on its ear. “I found nothing.”

“How could you say such a thing in front of our friend here? He is not nothing,” he said, holding up the bear. She snatched it back.

“Sentimental value only,” she said. “I am from here.”

“Yes, I know,” Boris said, his blue eyes narrowing. “What a strange coincidence, that I would find you here, of all places on Earth, the place where that suspicious transmission came from. And if I were to match up your ship’s records to all the other places I have been where key pieces of potential evidence have vanished into thin air…?”

“You would have to get a subpoena for those records,” Kata said.

“Yes.” Boris looked up at the sky. “I have asked myself many times why a fellow human, such as yourself, would hide evidence that might support Earth’s case in these trials.”

“Maybe the evidence wouldn’t support Earth’s case,” Kata said. “Maybe any human who hid such evidence would be doing you a favor, in which case you ought to let her keep hiding it, and forget you ever knew about it.”

Boris’s eyes were hard to see behind the glass of the helmet. But she thought that he looked at her for a long moment.

“Have a safe launch, Ms. Tabor,” Boris said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

“Was this the purpose of our trip, Kata?” Drobo asked, a light pulsing above the ship’s computer with the emphasis of each word. To compensate for his lack of a physical body, Drobo manipulated parts of the ship to give her something to look at. He seemed to understand that it made things easier for her. “ To retrieve a… plush toy?”

“He is a bear—”

“ He does not much resemble a bear. For one thing, his nose is a plastic tortoiseshell button rather than a projecting snout—”

“He’s a bear ,” she emphasized. “And he belonged to my sister.”

Kata had taken off the vacsuit in the airlock, hanging it on its hook, and stacking the gloves and helmet on the recessed shelf intended for that purpose. She wore the heavy boots still, so that she could activate the magnets in case of gravity malfunction.

“When Erszi was a teenager, she used to hide things from our parents. Cigarettes and drugs, mostly. They never found out, but I knew,” Kata said. “And more importantly, she knew that I knew.”

She tipped the bear forward on the table, and lifted the scissors she had retrieved from one of the drawers in the galley, nosing the point into the bear’s back. She cut through the fabric from butt to neck, then stuck her hand into the stuffing.

From somewhere inside the bear’s head, she pulled a slim gold cylinder, about the length of her pinkie finger.

“Erszi’s Echo ,” Drobo said, with something like reverence.

Kata had followed her sister’s path for a long time. Retracing her footsteps over Earth’s ruined surface, and then to fuel outposts and transport ships and post offices in the parts of space that had been colonized when Kata was a child. They had found the Echoes of her friends and neighbors and even her co-conspirators. Each time they found one, Kata had come back to the ship, launched it into orbit, and placed the Echo in the dock to see the projection, waiting for the ghostly figure of her sister to appear. The Echoes contained memories—the ones the dead wanted remembered.

But her sister had never appeared. This time, though, she would. Kata was certain of it.

The dock was a device about the size of her palm, indented in the middle where the Echo would fit. A small red light in the base turned blue after Kata plugged in the Echo, her hands trembling.

And then standing about a meter away from Kata was a slim young woman. Shorter than Kata, as she had been since Kata’s preteen growth spurt, her hair loose and limp over her shoulders, her eyes and cheeks sunken. This was how she had looked the last time Kata had seen her, but years after she fell in with Ütközet.

“Hello Erszi,” Kata said, bracing herself on the desk.

Erszi’s Echo would be able to respond to her as if she was a person, but she was not actually Erszi, not capable of being Erszi. She wasn’t a prog; she was just a narrow range of data pressed into the image of a person, a self-selected bundle of memories that told Kata not what Erszi really was, but what Erszi had wanted to be, what she had thought she was… or what she had intended to communicate about herself. It was just as likely that this Erszi was a post-mortem manipulation as a genuine attempt at memorializing herself.

But did the Echo know Kata? Did it contain any memories of the little sister Erszi had left behind? It would not make sense for Erszi to have retained such memories in her Echo. When Kata had chosen to undergo the surgery that had saved her from a premature death—replacing some of her body with computer and mechanics and synthetics—Erszi had sworn she would never speak to Kata again, that she was dead to her. And then the attack had happened. The evacuation. The end of the world. No chance to find out if her sister had really been so dedicated to her ideology.

Ütközet, the organization that had captured Erszi’s heart, had begun as a movement for the preservation of human life. A rejection of technology, a return to older ways, more “natural” ways. And it had transformed. Erszi had transformed.