Echoes of Another

  Echoes Of Another

  A Novel of the Near Future

  Chandra K. Clarke

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 Chandra K. Clarke.

  www.ChandraKClarke.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, address: chandraclarke@gmail.com

  Cover design by simansondesign.com

  Book Design by www.polgarusstudio.com

  ISBN 978-0-9730395-8-0 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-9730395-9-7 (ebook)

  Published by Fractal Moose Press,

  an imprint of Tiger Maple Publishing

  www.TigerMaplePublishing.com

  Table of Contents

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  About the Author

  PART I

  RAY

  Ray stepped out of the shadows of his apartment block and shivered in the cold.

  The sky was beryl blue and clear. The sun was just high enough over the horizon to send brilliant beams of light skittering across the snow, making it sparkle like diamonds. Drifts and rooftop snows had begun to evaporate, wraith mists gently rising into the air.

  He tugged his coat collar a little higher. If he had to guess, he figured it was about twenty degrees below freezing. Not so bad, especially for the first week of January, but he knew the buildings lining the downtown could sometimes funnel the cold wind until it howled.

  “Summon,” he said, enjoying the way his words formed plumes and floated away. The snow squeaked under his feet as he shifted the weight of his short, stocky frame from one to the other nervously. Several anxious moments passed before a single-seater pod emblazoned with the Toronto Transit Commission logo glided around the corner and stopped in front of him. He calmed down a bit, grateful the transponder he’d pickpocketed actually worked. The door opened, and he climbed into the small patch of warmth. There were no controls or amenities, just a thinly cushioned seat showing its age, a restraint that automatically clamped across his lap as soon as he sat down, and a hard, bioplastic dashboard with nothing on it other than an embedded screen. A small heater under the chair blasted hot air at his shoes. There was room enough for him and not much else. His sun visor fogged over from the abrupt change in temperature when the door closed, but he ignored the sudden blurriness, knowing it would clear on its own shortly.

  “Destination?” the pod asked, startling him. He’d been expecting to have to tap in a station.

  “Uh, Edward. Go by way of Sheppard and Queen’s Park Flows please.”

  The pod nav did a quick calculation. “Estimated arrival time, 7.3 minutes. Entertainment options?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” he replied. He wouldn’t have known what to ask for, anyway. Besides, he wanted to look at the beautiful old university buildings as they zoomed past. Perhaps he’d catch a glimpse of that determined-looking woman with the light-brown hair he had seen there. It would be a good omen, and he needed one. He had a lot riding on getting everything right this morning. This job would change everything.

  The pod accelerated, smooth and silent. There was hardly any traffic in his seedy neighbourhood, but as they approached the city core where the buildings were bigger and newer, the trickle of pods became a stream, and then a torrent. He tensed as his pod hurtled towards the major flow that would take him the rest of the way downtown. But the rushing vehicles adjusted, parting to reveal a pod-sized space into which they merged effortlessly. He looked at the dashboard and discovered that the screen showed him his position in real time. He marvelled at the thousands of pods pulsing like white blood cells through the arteries of the city.

  Ray tried to relax into his seat, but he was too jittery, and the chair was rather hard and uncomfortable. The pod slowed a little as it neared his destination. Already, he could see people hurrying along the footpaths, their shoulders hunched against the cold. He wondered how many of them were tourists; most city natives knew to use the downtown’s underground paths in weather like this.

  A familiar face flashed by the window. Startled, he spun around in his seat to look out the back.

  “Stop!”

  “Emergency stop,” the pod replied.

  Unfazed by the sudden change of plan, the pod decelerated and pulled carefully onto a footpath, its warning lights flashing brightly. Pedestrians walked around it but otherwise ignored both it and him. Ray wondered how often pods must have to make unplanned stops for it to be so unremarkable. He tumbled out of the pod and jogged back up along Bay Flow, rounding the corner in time to see the man he was looking for duck into an alley off Elm.

  “Hey, Mick!” Ray shouted, running faster.

  Mick was a tall man now; much different from the gangly, skinny teenager Ray remembered. Mick’s long legs and lithe frame meant he took rangy strides and had a fast pace. He was already halfway down the alley when Ray reached the entrance.

  “Mick!” Ray shouted again.

  Mick stopped and turned, frowning a little. His face broke into a wide, easy grin when he recognised Ray. He waited for him to catch up.

  “Hey man,” Mick said, pushing a wayward lock of brown hair out of his eyes. He wore a couple of day’s growth of beard. “Look at you, all grown up. You’re a long way out of J-District, aren’t you?”

  “I could say the same about you,” Ray replied, panting a little after his unexpected sprint. “What happened? You kinda disappeared on me.”

  “Yeah, I—”

  A drone dropped out of nowhere, stopping between them, hovering almost silently. It was big and black and unmarked, and it steamed like a dragon in the frigid air.

  It flicked a scanner beam, long and red, a tongue, up the length of Mick, tasting him. Mick’s eyes widened in fear.

  And then the drone exploded.

  KEL

  On the other side of Toronto, Kel Rafferty was bracing herself as she unlocked the habitat door.

  It wasn’t the smell she needed to prepare for. She liked the odours of the hab: the strong scent of wet earth, the powerful stench of the stagnant pond, and the musty, decomposing leaves that permeated air that was so thick with humidity you could almost swim in it. It certainly wasn’t like the city outside, and it made guests wrinkle their noses in distaste.

  No, Kel was bracing for the macaques, as they would often swarm her the minute she came in, climbing her tall frame, pulling on her long, ash-brown hair, trying to pull it out of its braid or picking at her bag to find the pieces of fruit they knew she carried in there. They were usually gentle with her and took their squabbles to the trees if a fight broke out over a choice bit of banana. Still, it could be nerve-wracking. They were wild animals, after all.

  She shrugged off her parka, tucked her hat and mitts inside its sleeve, and draped the coat over her arm. She then let the biometric scanner read the digital tattoo on her wrist, heard the lock release, and watched the door open for her. Kel waited patiently while the hab systems scanned her for pathogens that might harm the enclosed system. Then she unlocked the interior animal security door, the set up always making her think of an airlock on a space station.

  When she stepped inside the hab, it felt as though it had swallowed her whole. The heat and moisture enveloped her; her nostrils flared, and she took slow, deep breaths to combat the feeling of suffocation. She checked her wristband and saw it was quite hot, nearly 45°C with the humidex factored i
n.

  As she started down the trail that cut across the narrow end of the hab and led to her office, she smiled and recognised how lucky she was. For as long as she could remember, all she had ever wanted to do was neurological science, and here she was, working at arguably the largest facility in the world for studying animal models of neurodegenerative diseases.

  The hab was a fully realised indoor forest, one of the city’s best-kept secrets, spanning several hectares in the green zone tucked in between Markham, Scarborough, and Pickering. It was a joint project of the University of Toronto and the Toronto Zoological Research Centre, the latter still known to locals as the Toronto Zoo. Brilliant yellow leaf warblers flitted through the canopy, trading insults and jibes with the partridges that scuttled along the undergrowth. She could hear the gibbons hooting at each other in the distance, and she knew if she went off the trail, she’d see the leaves and plants ripple as the dull brown, striped skinks scattered to seek refuge in the water. Although not as diverse as the Hainan ecosystem it mimicked, the hab contained a wide array of birds, reptiles, small mammals, and dozens of species of insects.

  All to support her macaques. Well, not just for her, she supposed. The stricter animal rights laws of the early 2020s had mandated proper living conditions for non-human primate studies, so the administration had shrewdly attracted several other researchers and specialists to the facilities to extract as much value as possible from the elaborate setup. As expensive as it was, the scientist in Kel approved: happier animals made for better and far more accurate data. She also found the other research being done there fascinating. Among other things, they were learning so much more about how mycorrhizal fungi helped trees thrive and communicate.

  She reached her office door, unlocked it, and walked in. The cooler, drier air was a welcome relief, as always. The office was spacious, with a wall given over to a large one-way observation window, so she and her colleagues could look into the hab. Another wall was covered with screens connected to more than a hundred tiny cameras scattered throughout the habitat, which they used to monitor the forest and its inhabitants. A door in the third wall led to a laboratory, a pharmacy, and a fabbing area. There were six desks in the office, arranged in an open plan. Even with being delayed this morning — many of the pod flows had been rerouted because of an incident downtown Kel had only vaguely noted — she was the first one in, as usual.

  She put her bag on her desk next to a display that shuffled through several images of her favourite grandmother. “Wake screens,” she said to the wall, tossing her coat on her chair.

  The monitors blinked to life. Her blue eyes flicked to the upper right, where the cameras were trained on the macaques’ preferred gathering spot — a small space between the plum yew trees that was good for rolling and tackling and chasing. She furrowed her eyebrows in concern. The animals were there, as expected, but they were agitated, bouncing around from place to place more than usual, hugging each other, baring their teeth, and widening their eyes in alarm. They often fought with each other to establish their hierarchy, but this seemed… different.

  “Audio, camera six,” Kel said.

  The room filled with shrill, anxious, chittering barks.

  “Audio off.” Kel tried to do a quick head count. They weren’t all there, but it was hard to tell how many were missing. And none of them were engaging in grooming behaviours, which meant nobody was ready to calm down yet. What had set them off so? “Status report, most recent log entries.”

  “Significant event: implant for Max ceased transmitting thirty minutes ago, and he is assumed dead. Implant for Dalton transmitting, with decreasing intensity, from 2.5 metres outside camera sixteen’s range.”

  Kel swore.

  SETH

  In a modest group of semi-detached houses on Harvie Flow, just beyond Toronto’s Corso Italia district, the clock flicked to 8:00 a.m. The window in Seth’s bedroom slowly changed from its blackout tint to a beautifully translucent, algorithmically generated frost pattern. He groaned and sat up, blinking in the sunlit patch on his bed. His room was scrupulously clean and very well soundproofed; the only thing he could hear was the filter sucking dust out of the air.

  Monday again. Mild anxiety gripped him, squeezing his stomach. Between the surprise visits from his cousin’s family and the usual chores and errands that always seemed to take twice as long as they should, it seemed like the weekend had just vanished. He sighed and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, the muscles of his lean, fit body flexing easily, without stiffness.

  Seth tapped his wristband, and a virtual screen appeared in the air. He scrolled through its long list of numbers with a flicking motion. Body temperature: normal. Total sleep: seven and a half hours. Fasting blood sugar: normal. He scrolled some more and then hesitated.

  “Tasha, why are my selenium levels trending low?”

  “Data indicates your selenium levels are within normal parameters,” his digital personal assistant replied.

  “Yes, but they’re on the low end for the third day in a row,” Seth said.

  His DPA paused before answering. “Analysis of your diet for the past seven days suggests selenium intake has been optimal, as with all of your other micronutrients, as per your instructions. It is possible your bio-analysis implant needs recalibrating, but records show you had the implant recalibrated last week.”

  “All right, all right,” Seth said, making a waving gesture to force the display away. He walked into his bathroom and peered at his face. First, he checked the area around his big, russet eyes for wrinkles and lines in his dark skin before running a hand over his dense, wiry brown hair, inspecting it for grey. Then he gave his gums and teeth a thorough examination before cleaning them carefully. He went to the toilet, but resisted the urge to check his wristband again for the urinalysis numbers.

  It wasn’t until he was in the bathroom, standing under a showerhead that atomised the water to produce both steam and a waterfall that he relaxed enough to think about how he would advance the plot of his latest novel. Seth had written himself into a corner on Friday and he still had no idea how to fix it. He loathed the thought he might have to scrap what he’d done, as getting this far had already been such a battle.

  It would be his fourth novel. One critic had described his previous book, The Gift of Nobody, as a “searing exploration of the antiquated notion of privacy in the era of the thingweb.” Another critic proclaimed it “had the potential to spark an intense debate on whether it was either safe or wise to allow people to disconnect.” But it had seen little in the way of domestic sales — just a few thousand copies — and even fewer sales abroad, so the argument was short lived. None of the major culture aggregator bots had surfaced the online discussions he had participated in, so the book never went viral.

  It wasn’t the royalties that concerned him — well, not too much, anyway. The basic annual income guaranteed adequate food and housing. What he needed was readers, and lots of them. He was confident enough now as a writer to know his work resonated if he managed to get it into people’s hands. And there were so many things he wanted to say, if only he could find more readers.

  If only.

  His current book, which he’d tentatively titled Beget, was about a sculptor obsessed with Michelangelo and who insisted on carving real stone with hand tools, even though he could use a fabber to print something intricate, or a pocket laser engraver and achieve far more precision. Seth wanted to explore what it meant to be an artist when just about anyone could be one, and when the tools required to quickly generate high-quality art in any medium were cheaply and widely available.

  He shifted his position to let the water pour down his back. How could any single person be special when everyone was special? And what about things like Tasha? He knew his DPA could produce a great narrative report on the most recent Leafs game by analysing the video feed, and it could write a serviceable romance novel in about twenty minutes if he set the character parameters. Indeed, many people
read nothing but the super-formulaic genre fiction churned out by their DPAs. Fortunately, there were a lot more readers — like Seth — who found the characters in these novels flat and lifeless; they were also boring after you’d read a few, much like the sports reports.

  Seth stood there for a while, leaning against the shower stall tiles, enjoying the contrasting coolness on his skin. The problem was, if he was honest with himself, he didn’t know the answer to any of those questions. And did he truly find the DPA-generated writing boring, or was he just being a snob?

  He thought about the impassioned debates back when ebooks had become a big thing. Many people had claimed to be horrified by the very idea of an ebook even though it offered several advantages and the mass print book production era had been incredibly wasteful. These days, only superfans had a hemp or bamboo paper fabbed version of the books they wanted to keep in hard copy, and they were expensive and treasured. His own hard copy library was a thoroughly eclectic mix of authors such as Margaret Atwood, Terry Pratchett, Andre Brink, Michael Ondaatje, Irving Stone, and Maya Angelou.

  He sighed, finished his shower, dressed, and walked the short distance to his kitchen to find his food fabber.

  “Present breakfast options.”

  “It is Monday,” Tasha replied. “Will you be exercising this morning?”

  “Yes,” Seth answered. “I have my Kenpo class. But I think I have somewhere else to be today?”

  “That’s tomorrow,” said Tasha. “You have a meal with your family. Home menu choices for that day have been adjusted accordingly.”

  “Excellent,” Seth rubbed his hands together. That would give him the whole day to work. He considered the fabber screen. He had tailored the menu schedule to provide consistent energy throughout the day, but peak energy and alertness in the evening hours, when he felt he was at his most creative. Three meal options appeared on-screen: cricket flour flakes and milk, a termite muffin, and buqadilla, a spicy dish of chickpeas and mealworm protein.