Constance (Constance #1)(5)
Con alone had accepted her aunt’s gift despite, or perhaps because of, it being wrapped in an emphatic fuck you. The mixed-race daughter of a fire-breathing white evangelical and a half-Black, half-Vietnamese army corporal, Con had grown up an outsider, contending with tormenters of every age and race. She’d had to fight her way through school. Too small to win most of them, she’d learned the art of survival instead. Stubbornness was a rich vein of ore running through both sides of her family, and Con mined it for the will to endure anything. Setting her jaw, she willed her way through childhood following three simple rules: never cry in public; never ask for help; never, ever give them the satisfaction of knowing they’d gotten to her. So when the taunting letter from her aunt had arrived, Con recognized the work of a bully. She tore up the letter and took the clone even though she wasn’t sure why she wanted it.
Since Con had been in DC, her aunt had never once reached out to her. Not even when Con was convalescing in the hospital following the operations to reattach her leg. And in the two years that she had been coming to Palingenesis to refresh her upload, Abigail had never emerged from her laboratories to say so much as hello. Outside Palingenesis’s windows, the great tent of umbrellas trembled in frustration, and once again, Con thought of birds. Only, this time, it was of the ravens that sometimes gathered along the Texas highways of her childhood, waiting on a dying animal to give it up. What had Gamma Jol called a group of ravens? An unkindness? Yes, she thought, that sounded about right.
CHAPTER THREE
The genius of Palingenesis was that it felt more like an upscale day spa than a clinic. Instead of a sterile waiting room, Con was let into a sweeping atrium that was always a sun-dappled dawn, courtesy of photosensitive skylights that adjusted throughout the day. The sound of a waterfall cascading gently into a koi pond set into the center of the floor echoed soothingly off the rough-hewn limestone walls. Shallow alcoves displayed arrangements of sclera-white orchids in blue china pots and willow branches in glass vases. No hint that, deep in the bowels of the building, the laws of nature were being systematically rewritten.
The atrium had no reception desk, but Con knew the drill. She sat patiently on the ledge of the pond, skimming her fingertips across the water and watching the orange-and-white fish cavort beneath emerald lily pads. She hummed part of a tune to a new song she’d been working on. It had no lyrics yet, but the guards’ jokes about her aunt kept coming back to her: a witch without a broom, a witch without a broom. Words began to string themselves together in her mind as they always did when she felt inspired, and she sang quietly to herself, testing how they fit the melody. There might be something there. She wondered if she’d get in trouble if she brought her guitar next time. The acoustics were spectacular.
Curious what the rest of the world was saying about her aunt’s death, Con searched for articles on her LFD. In the weeks to come, there would be time for long-form opinion pieces about Abigail Stickling’s impact on American life, but it had only been a matter of hours, so most news outlets carried only bullet-point accounts of the suicide. The gist was that at 11:34 p.m. on December 25, contentious inventor of human cloning Abigail Stickling had taken her own life, jumping from the roof of the historic Monroe Hotel. Witnesses reported that Dr. Stickling had sat at the bar of Skyline, the popular restaurant overlooking the White House, chatting with bartenders and drinking champagne. After paying her tab, she’d gained access to the roof, where she jumped to her death. There were links to security camera footage from the restaurant, but Con had no desire to click on any of them.
One article noted that Abigail had never married, nor was she close to her family. That was putting it mildly, Con thought. A second article said that her aunt had been battling depression in the last few years (something else they had in common). It went on to mention that, as a child, Abigail had been diagnosed with Wilson’s disease, a rare genetic disorder that caused a buildup of copper in the body and brain. It could be managed with medication, but the copper interfered with the cloning process, so, the article took unseemly pleasure in explaining, unlike Palingenesis’s clients, Abigail Stickling would not be coming back. Con shut off her LFD, unsure why she suddenly felt protective of her aunt.
On the far side of the pond, a silver-haired white man in a terry-cloth robe struggled to fill out the client paperwork on his LFD. Con gave him points for trying. A lot of people over forty had a hard time with next-gen light-field devices and clung to their legacy smartphones rather than adapting. She watched him adjust the fit of his LFD, which rested behind the ear like an old-fashioned hearing aid and projected data to a floating point six inches in front of the user’s eyes. When that didn’t solve his problem, he reached out with both hands like he was trying to feel his way in the dark. It really wasn’t necessary. LFDs were paired to their users and would read hand movements from any position. Kids who had grown up with the technology were blindingly fast, all ten fingers working independently, hands fluttering at their sides. But for older users like the silver fox over there, the need to “touch” the screen was hard to break. The results could be hilariously uncoordinated. Exactly why kids mocked their parents as “zombs” for the way they flailed their arms in front of their faces.
The man noticed Con watching and frowned as if he’d caught her peeking in his bedroom window. He looked at her worn-at-the-knee jeans and black T-shirt, deciding everything about her that needed deciding. The wealthy sensed poverty the way other people smelled something that had soured at the back of a refrigerator. Con had read somewhere that the average net worth of Palingenesis’s clientele was five hundred million—cheating death didn’t come cheap.