Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

time she was hungover and sick, instead of yelling at her or grounding her, he would bring her Tylenol, and encourage her to drink water, and take her out for a greasy breakfast. He would take her to visit colleges, and give her away at her wedding, and when his hair and stubble were more salt than pepper, he would buy his grandchildren their first pairs of Nikes. It was all right there in front of Quinn the moment he took that little box out of the bag and opened it up to show her what he’d bought, but instead of looking at the shoes, she was looking at him, and right then, she knew that everything would always be OK.

Another thing Quinn’s husband unexpectedly brought home one day was one of the very first commercially available volumetric video rigs. It took him most of a Saturday to get all the cameras properly positioned and calibrated, but the next day, after her nap, they sat Molly down in the center of her foam alphabet puzzle mat and recorded six minutes (the maximum duration back then) of her playing. Almost subconsciously, after folding her boarding pass up like an accordion, Quinn had lowered her metaspecs and brought up the footage, and now a 3D version of Molly is sitting on the faux-hardwood laminate flooring in the center of the break room. The capture circle had been tiny—just big enough for a baby—so both Quinn and her husband are off camera, but whatever they are doing has Molly enraptured. There is a distant comical sound effect followed by an explosion of that delightful and infectious baby laughter that is the purest, most unadulterated form of joy Quinn can imagine. Eventually it dies down as Molly grows charmingly serious just before bringing the tips of her joined fingers together like frogs kissing—the sign they’d taught her for “more.” Again, the off-camera sound effect, and again, pure effervescence in little human form. Edge detection wasn’t very good back then, so background artifacts from the breakfast-nook-turned-playroom sometimes creep in around Molly’s blond curls, but overall, the effect is spellbinding, and Quinn is transfixed.

The clip is only six minutes long, but she has spent dozens of cumulative hours watching it, and as the familiar taste of tears enters the corners of her mouth, she questions whether this is still a source of joy for her or whether it is just another form of emotional cutting. Maybe we weren’t meant to remember for this long and with this level of fidelity. Maybe all of this technology will prove to be a failed and unimaginably costly human experiment. Quinn wonders whether she will still be watching these same six minutes twenty years from now—still subconsciously bringing it up, still tasting tears in an empty room, still haunted by the light-field ghost of her long-dead daughter.

She wonders whether, in order to move on, she will one day need to relearn how to forget.

The hologram seamlessly transitions back to the beginning and continues playing. Molly isn’t wearing shoes in the video, and even if she were, they wouldn’t be the baby Nikes her father bought her, since she would have outgrown them by then. Quinn still has one of them. The left one. It’s in the original shoebox, and the shoebox is in a plastic bin that’s stacked somewhere inside her storage unit thousands of miles away in suburban Virginia. The right one is gone. It got chewed up by the black Lab they tried rescuing seven months after Molly drowned. When her husband saw what the dog had done, he pinned it down by its throat and the dog yelped and peed and Quinn could see the whites of its terrified copper eyes. James did not kill the dog, but after he stood up, he screamed, and on his way out of the room, he punched the bedroom door so hard that he knocked it off its hinges. He left a trail of bright red blood splatters as he stepped over the door and went downstairs and left the house, and then it was quiet, and the dog was too afraid to move, and Quinn stood there alone in the bedroom knowing that nothing would ever be OK again.

19

  AMBERLEY-ASH IS NOT SMILING

COMMUNICATION IN THE age of mass surveillance demands a sophisticated and intricate dance. One must transact digitally in order to maximize efficiency, but it is imperative that you never associate enough data with a single identifiable entity to allow your adversaries to piece together a coherent narrative.

For instance, having the name of your next target communicated through layers of obfuscation and bounced around multiple encrypted proxies located all over the globe poses an acceptable risk—so long as you do not transmit payment information back in the same direction. In Ranveer’s view, it is far safer to let easily hacked coroner reports and sensationalized media do the work of broadcasting unique four-digit numbers for you.

The Grid has always posed unique challenges. Despite Qatari guarantees of near absolute sovereignty, there are still plenty of crevices and cavities inside the matrix of offshore exclaves where one might find oneself trapped. Which is exactly why Ranveer has traditionally preferred to transact with Grid interests electronically, or to send a neutral third party, paid for in cash. But every once in a while, when the world is expecting you to zig, the best move you have is to zag.

Therefore, given that Qatar is practically just up the street from Oman, Ranveer has decided to take the day and go on-Grid. Emirates Airlines is only too happy to hold his cases inside a private vault that his biometric signature alone can unlock, as well as give him access to a private, vapor-sterilized washroom where, in addition to showering and shaving, he applies the principles of electrolysis to recharge a couple of cartridges.

There are two stops on Ranveer’s itinerary. The first is a laboratory run by a woman named