Blackfish City(30)

She hugged the flowers to her chest. Shut her eyes and tried to remember her mother’s face.

The woman she saw was not her mom. She knew this. She was a summary, a splice, a combination of a hundred warm, loving, smiling mothers she’d seen in movies and at the homes of friends and in the families she visited for work. Ankit had no real memories of her mother’s face from when she was a child. What she’d seen the last time she’d been with her mother had been too horrible to hold on to. Fifteen years ago, a dark red wet sobbing mess, a mouth open wide in a howl Ankit could not hear through the window in the door.

Her jaw bug buzzed. Fifty-Seventh Street Corp., it whispered.

She answered. “Breckenridge?”

“Still in the hospital, the poor creature,” said a hale but ancient voice. “Martin Podlove speaking. I am the shareholder responsible for Fifty-Seventh Street Corp.”

“Mr. Podlove, thank you for your call,” she said. “I’m surprised to hear you identify yourself so openly. Shareholder invisibility—”

“—is a privilege we dispense with quite frequently, actually. When we know someone can keep a secret. When we know how much they stand to lose.”

He let her chew on that for an instant or two, and then when she started to respond he said, “My colleague passed on your request for funds. I figured I owed you a call, at least. There’s something cowardly about sending bad news as words on a screen.”

“No,” Ankit said, stricken. “No . . . you can’t do that. Fyodorovna will lose this election if you don’t help. In a different year an incumbent might be able to weather this storm, but times are too tough. Rents have been rising, out on Arm Seven. Evictions, displacement . . . People are mad, and they blame her for their problems, and they’ll choose the devil they don’t know.”

Podlove said nothing. He was enjoying this.

“We’re useful to you,” Ankit said, and knew, then, that the battle was lost.

“Everyone is useful to us. Think I haven’t been backing your opposition? Think they won’t do what I ask? You know politics better than that, Ankit.”

He tapped off.

She looked up at the Cabinet. She stood there until the shaking subsided. Early, still, for her appointment, but the processing always took too long and she figured she could start the waiting now. Better that than standing around wishing for the ability to summon a wave of cleansing nuclear fire out of thin air.

Entering the Cabinet felt like sinking below the sea. White noise pods lined the curved walls and the doorway, cocooning the building from the sonic chaos of the city outside. People spoke but she could not hear them, and that was part of the process, part of the therapy. She looked at the crowd in the waiting room, wondered who was there to be processed and who was simply visiting. Either way, she felt immense pity for them.

“Ankit Bahawalanzai,” she said into the triage scanner. “Two P.M. appointment.”

The hexagon flashed green. A door hissed open. She was pulling off her shirt before it had shut behind her, placing her clothes on the table, standing in her underwear in the center of the room, letting the lasers wipe over her, pretending she could feel them. They’d be confirming her identity, scanning for threats and communicable medical conditions and who knew what else. Medical scanning algorithms changed all the time, looked for different things, got more sophisticated in some ways, became blindingly stupid in others. A couple of years ago they had all been obsessed with hair follicle analysis. Before that it had been fingernails. She imagined the AIs getting together at conferences, arrogant as doctors, swapping stories in silicon hallways, exchanging bad ideas.

A weird hiccup, in the flow of the white noise.

“Ms. Bahawalanzai?”

“Hi,” Ankit said, and felt her cheeks heat up, because this was not good, an actual human being was never a good sign.

“I’m Michaela,” said the young woman. “Can we sit?”

Ankit saw that the table had become two chairs. She hated this place, its expensive and unnecessary technology. Some Health facilities were nicer than others, and few were “nicer” than this, but they all shared the same redundant proliferation of scientific equipment, the telltale traces of the massive investments made in health care during the Cancer Years.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m so sorry,” Michaela said. “But your body scans showed anxiety, tension. Your mother is not permitted proximity to those things. You understand, I’m sure. As a blood relative, especially?”

“No,” Ankit said, “no, I do not understand. What does my being a blood relative have to do with anything?”

“Ah,” Michaela said, frowning down at something on her screen. She had blurted something out, pertaining to some classified aspect of her mother’s condition. Something Ankit was not supposed to know. “Mentally ill people are especially sensitive to the emotional states of others.”

“I know that. Of course I know that. But you said—”

Michaela stood. The software would be guiding her through this stage of the conversation, surely. The Oh Shit You Fucked Up AI, Ankit thought. Would it cost her? Did they keep track of every little error?

Her mother was Code 76. That meant that someone, maybe in Safety and maybe in Health and maybe in the home nations, had decided that the details of her confinement constituted a protected secret. Whatever was wrong with her, what events had precipitated it—even her name—someone had convinced someone else that these could never be revealed. Ankit had always known this. She’d made her peace with it, the way you make peace with what can never be known. Digging into things like that only made you angry, started you down dangerous pathways, got you in trouble. But when she walked out of the Cabinet that day, when she tossed her bouquet of flowers into the sea and shrieked into the rising vortex, she decided it was time to get in trouble. To dig. To find out why her mother was in there.