Full Spectrum 4 (Jerry eBooks) by Lou Aronica & Amy Stout & Betsy Mitchell

Author:Lou Aronica & Amy Stout & Betsy Mitchell [Aronica, Lou & Stout, Amy & Mitchell, Betsy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Daughter

I’d waited long enough. Did she think I had forever? Early afternoon, the day before the Big Check-Out, I tried to raise Mom on the Link. “Access blocked,” the Link replied.

Son of a bitch. “Where is she?” I asked the Net.

“New Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, California. She is walking.”

I marched out of my place and hailed a pod. I’d track her down, even if it meant sorting through all the tourists on S.F. Island.

Before I was airborne, I had a better idea. I rerouted the vehicle to Monica’s apartment.

I made it to her front door and pressed my thumb against the lock. If my guess were right, Mom hadn’t bothered to remove my DNA signature from the lock’s database. She was terrible about those sorts of details.

“Monica is not at home,” the door said.

So far so good. It wouldn’t have spoken at all if it hadn’t recognized me.

“I need to get in.”

“Please wait,” it said. I knew it was placing a call to Mom. I also knew the Link wouldn’t put it through. A door query was too routine to override the block. “Monica does not respond.”

“She’s taking a little retreat,” I said. “She asked me to look after the apartment for a day or so.”

This apparently satisfied the door’s guard program. It unlocked.

I meandered through the rooms. I hadn’t been past the front room for two months, but the place was mostly the same. Other people might order their domiciles to redecorate themselves every week, but not Monica. Once in a while she’d move a wall, to create a more open feel, but she’d left things more or less alone ever since she’d moved out of the larger place we’d shared during my childhood. The Japanese rice paper scroll above the toilet had been there so long that it would have disintegrated had not the housekeeping programs restored it periodically.

I brewed some tea and strolled onto the balcony. A hummingbird stole nectar from a trumpet vine blossom not five feet away. The bird’s ruby throat shifted momentarily to match the brassy tone of the flower—the city parks and rec department sure liked those chameleonic hummers—then the little thing rose up, perched in midair to regard me, and whizzed off so fast I couldn’t track it.

Mom had generated the original of that trumpet vine when I was ten. What was that creator’s name? Oh, yeah. Josef Rautiainen, one of the first Finnish horticultural maestros. Her hero.

Something about the apartment was wrong. The tea grew lukewarm while I puzzled it out.

I was drawn into the master bedroom. Gradually, by instinct, my gaze drifted to the large montage picture frame opposite the bed. Scenes of Mom’s life filled the rectangles and ovals. I located the two portraits of her parents—one showing them in advanced middle age, just before the immortality threshold was reached; another of them restored to youth, as they looked on the day their ark left for Proxima Centauri. There were wedding shots of their parents, for whom nanotech didn’t arrive in time.

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