The Floret in the Mirror Chapter 10 Draft Excerpt

Hey y'all. So, good news, bad news. Bad news, I don't have a finished chapter due to the various factors I mentioned last week. Good news, I have, I dunno, about half a chapter that I can post, and it's more or less a complete scene, so you don't go totally without. 

(I'm starting to think this time of year in general is just hell on my creative impulse — which is weird because I prefer it by far to summer!) 

Content Warning: Some loose medical language about brain injury.

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The rays of a setting sun poured in, dishwater grey across the colorless office. Somewhere in the distance, a saxophone painted the city with its tears in long, hanging notes. A cigarette, half turned to ash, smoldered between two fingers; in her other hand, Jess Lophophora, Third Floret Ramet held a shotglass full of bourbon that she’d been pondering for the last five minutes straight.

Entry wound, cervical spinal column.

Penetrating trauma to the central axis of the haustoric implant.

Foreign object (biological) present in the wound; removed (some microscopic particles may remain).

Initial Prognosis: fatal injury.

Outcome: partial recovery (anteriograde amnesia, haustoric implant dysfunction). Follow-up care required.

It was not the sort of puzzle that Jess typically solved. Hers was a world of numbers, of programs, of subroutines, commands, and exploits. She was usually the one on the attack, the one trying to sneak in, the one trying to get away with something. Now, she was working a case from the opposite side — this was Blue Team work, defensive hacking, except there wasn’t really anything to hack except a question.

What the frost happened to my ortet? The medical files she thought would answer that question had only ended up deepening it.

She was shaken from the question that had seized her mind for the last week or more — and indeed, she was no longer entirely certain, having disabled her system clock to avoid the distraction of checking it obsessively while she worked — by the ringing of her phone. Ash tumbled from her fingers as she startled, set down the shotglass, and picked up the phone, only to be met with the squawking of a modem. Wincing, she laid the handset down in the cradle of her desktop modem and opened her laptop, a classic 1925 Singer model she’d pulled from the Overnet database, boxy and weighing about twenty-five pounds of pure metal. The cathode ray tube flickered, and the laptop made a series of little ticking noises that Jess could only describe as ‘gender’ as its magnetic platter hard drives spun up. Mechanical keys clacked under her fingers as she pulled up her terminal.

ALERT - LOGIN ATTEMPT FROM guest@Layla’s Tablet

Jess furrowed her brow. Layla? Dirt, had she left her tablet lying around somewhere again? Jess loved the old revolutionary, but she’d basically given up on the concept of security post-domestication. The next question, then, was why someone was trying to log in to her account — with a few loud, clunky keystrokes, she connected to the tablet, seized control of it through a backdoor, and overrode the screen to load a direct messaging program.

>> [15:56:08.436] sudont@Monolith: Who is this and why are you trying to to get into my account on Layla’s tablet?

She pushed back from the desk and stood up. Her sim was running about five times faster than universal standard — she probably had a minute or so before she could expect a reply. That was long enough to cross to the coffee maker, pour herself a cup, and stare at the wall she’d covered with notes, pictures, and other evidence markers, all of it connected with pushpins and red string, the only splash of color in the room.

What happened to you, Jess Lopophora? She took a sip of the bitter brew, following the string from point to point and hoping for a brainwave. What happened to you that made me happen?

A moment later, still lost in thought, she heard the spinning of the Singer’s hard drives — that would be the response coming in. Breaking character just a little, Jess reached out and digitally dialed up the time differential to 10x, leisurely making her way back to the desk and taking a seat in front of the laptop once more.

>> [15:56:21.048] guest@Layla’s Tablet: okay very funny, get off my acct before I get serious!!!

Jess squinted at the screen. The frost does that mean? She quickly composed and fired off a reply.

>> [15:56:21.094] sudont@Monolith: What do you mean, your account?

Almost the instant she pressed return to send the message, though, a thought crystallized in the back of her mind. My account.

>> [15:56:21.156] sudont@Monolith: Wait

It was her. It was her ortet. She was awake, and she was trying to get into her account — because of course she was — and Layla’s Tablet must have been the first computer she could get her hands on. She remembered having briefly talked to Layla a week or so ago from her perspective, after she’d been asked to take point on her ortet’s wakeup after the way she’d reacted the first time.

>> [15:56:21.196] sudont@Monolith: Oh crud

Now she was awake again, and trying to log in to her own account — except someone was already logged into her account — Jess herself. The new Jess. The duplicate Jess. Her simulated gut clenched in a way that had nothing to do with the bourbon and coffee going to war with one another.

>> [15:56:21.251] sudont@Monolith: Oh frick

Why was she still typing? Why was she still digging this hole deeper? Why was she bothering to emulate all these awful physical sensations of anxiety? She needed to get out of this simulation, and she needed to ask Admin for help.

>> [15:56:21.301] sudont@Monolith: Im sorry

She slammed the Singer shut, pulled the phone’s handset from the modem and dropped it back in its cradle, and promptly killed the simulation. The muted greys fell away into a vast, cityscape-like circuit of neon lines and flashing images — after experimenting with a few other sensory overlays, Jess had found one that particularly spoke to her. On some level, it reminded her of that old Information Age movie she’d seen as a kid that she could never remember the name of, or really any details about, but which had carved such an indelible groove into her psyche.

[Admin! Admin!] she sent, repeatedly querying Her phytoneuronogical uplink, the digital equivalent of tugging at a vine for attention. [Admin!]

[Calm down, little one.] Admin’s presence detonated in Jess’s mind with a calming flood of ATP packets and Class-E narcoalgorithms. [I expect this is about your ortet.]

[She’s awake and she got Layla’s tablet somehow and she tried to log in to sudont but I’m on sudont so she couldn’t so she kept poking so I rooted the tablet and that’s how I found out it was her and then I panicked.] Even with the narcoalgorithms, she still felt an edge of anxiety, of worry. From her ortet’s perspective, someone was in her account who shouldn’t be, and no doubt she was feeling the same way.

[I know, nybble, I’ve been talking to Arvense. He’s about to go in to talk to her, actually. It seems like her memory loss might be worse than we thought.]

[What do you mean?]

[Her memory loss seems to precede even Solstice. I’m not sure how total that loss is — Arvense will let me know once he’s had a chance to examine her.]

Even if Her ATP transfer was smooth and controlled, Jess could tell Admin was worried too. [I’m worried about her. And I’m worried she might be mad at me for being on sudont. Maybe I should just let her have it? I’ve been using that handle for so long, and she obviously remembers it...]

[You haven’t done anything wrong, Jess,] Admin sent, the ATP packets taking on a firm but loving edge.

[Maybe not, but still, I want her to feel comfortable. I can pick out a new handle, it’s not a big deal.] She’d been using it since she was scraping out a meager existence on Earth, cracking systems to cover rent and food at the same time, but she was here and safe and if her ortet was really missing so much memory, she should have at least one familiar thing to hold onto.

[You are a very good little program, you know that?] Jess shivered as Admin looped the praise through her core cognitive processes. [If you’re going to do that, though, please move your data troves. Arvense says too much information at once might overwhelm her.]

[Yes, Admin,] Jess sent, spinning off a process to iterate on new usernames. In the meantime, she created a new placeholder account simply called ‘echo’ and began the process of copying over her data. [I should probably leave her alone, shouldn’t I? Not talk to her, I mean.]

[For the time being. I think it’d be best to introduce you two in person, anyway, and your chassis is still undergoing final safety checks.]

Jess’s heart lit up. Her chassis. Admin had been putting it together while she’d been investigating — once she’d known she had an ortet, she wanted to have a way to interact with her in the physical world as well as via digital interfaces. [How long do you think we should wait?]

[It depends on how well she settles in tonight. Would you like to play Hab AI for us?]

[I’d love to!!!]

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