Heir Apparent - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 4 Read online

  For an instant, the zombie’s multi-jointed legs spread, trying to stay on both planks. Too late, it tried to leap forward. It hit the water with a cannonball splash and sank instantly.

  Marszalek went back inside. She pulled the blinds so the taxi couldn’t see in and then returned to the galley. The professor was still listening to Howard.

  “The entity wouldn’t tell me where it came from,” Howard was saying. “It said it wanted to show me. In the meantime, though, I’ve already figured it out. Anomaly 73 in the asteroid belt provided the clue in its spectrogram. I’ll let you figure that one out, Professor: an entertaining puzzle.”

  “What’s the entity?” whispered Marszalek.

  The professor ignored her. Something was happening on the surface of the sea on Titan. Waves turned, lapping together in concentric rings that built up a mound of liquid ethane, defying gravity. The mound rose, forming a sphere whose surface rippled in the crawler’s lights. It rolled toward Howard, who’d turned to watch it.

  Up onto the shore it came, its liquid surface jiggling and dancing in patterns that no longer seemed random. Howard reached out his hand and the sphere touched it, engulfing his glove, then his arm.

  “It’s hollow,” he said. Then it rolled forward and swallowed him.

  There was no sign of Howard within the ball. It kept rolling toward the crawler, the floodlights reflecting off its shifting surface like mercury.

  It reached the crawler, splashing up against its hood. The surface spread toward the camera. For a moment, she had a view of a golden plain on a world lit by a red sun. Howard was facing the camera. Then the signal from Titan ceased.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  They replayed the recording, studying the last frame. The surface at Howard’s feet looked like damp sand, with some footprints like an ostrich’s showing on it. There was nothing else in sight, but Howard’s gaze was looking up and slightly to the left as if he saw something far more interesting than the crawler. He was smiling like a man who’d finally found the answers to his questions.

  Though they waited well past sunset, Howard’s signal never resumed. The taxi finally left, and the professor took Marszalek back to the dock.

  “Let me know if you hear from him,” she said.

  The professor nodded and handed her a disk of the recording to give to Ginny. The sky was getting dark and stars were coming out. The professor pointed to Saturn, just above the hills, but she wasn’t sure which dot of light he meant. The professor told her it didn’t matter since Howard was no longer on Titan anyway.

  “I guess you’ll go back to Ukiah and mark this case closed now,” he said, “though it will never be closed for me.”

  She nodded and waved goodbye.

  But on the way home, she bought ten tickets to the Daily Wish

  .

  Ghostbook

  By Paul Cook

  Russ Cantwell brooded in his cubicle, having already forgotten the dreary content of his last service call, when a chime went off on his right-hand screen. That screen was open to his Facebook page, although nothing had appeared on it for hours. Now there was an announcement box with the declaration: Patricia Morris Cantwell would like to be Friends with you on Facebook.

  Cantwell practically fell out of his chair. He read it again, just to be sure.

  Patricia Morris Cantwell. His mother.

  His deceased mother.

  “What the—”

  It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water at him. He’d practically been on autopilot these past few days and it took him a moment to come around to what was actually on the screen.

  Obviously, it was a joke. But at least he was awake now. Since there were no service calls for him at the moment, he clicked “Accept” and then sat back and waited for Facebook’s new fusion-driven quantum computers to do their magic. Old man Zuckerberg was rumored to own about half a dozen of the Zerwick 1000s, each costing about six billion dollars. They were supposed to do wonders—fast.

  Faster than instantly, Cantwell was shown the Facebook page of Patricia Morris Cantwell.

  In the upper left-hand corner beneath Facebook’s modest logo was a small photograph of a black-haired woman, taken when she had to have been about twenty-five years old and when he, Cantwell, would have been about four. It was his mother, all right. However, when his mother had been alive, she’d had her own Facebook page. Her picture then had been that of a forty-four-year-old woman with a stylish blond streak along one side of her head. Colored hair for women had come back in style these last few decades.

  This picture was of a much younger woman with no blond streak at all. It was still that of his mother. The large, wide eyes; the mobile mouth with a touch of sensuality. Cantwell stared at the page unbelievingly.

  He stood up from his desk in his cubicle and scanned about the vast help center for Denver, Colorado’s Cosmi-Tech, International. Somebody here had to be playing a prank on him. But who? He searched for the usual suspects among his colleagues, but none of the thirty or so technicians was looking his way—no one trying to suppress an impish smile; no one sniggering, trying to control their absolute delight in grumpy Russ’s discomfort.

  Cantwell leaned over to the cubicle just in front of his. Eugene Bostwick, like everyone else there, had a Master’s degree and could easily have pulled off a stunt like this. Software integration—even hacking—would have been nothing to someone like him. Engineering a bogus Facebook page would have been a cinch.

  “Okay, Bostwick, what’s up with this?” he demanded.

  Gene Bostwick craned around, looking up. He covered his pin-mike with one hand and glowered at Russ. He was clearly in the midst of a service call.

  “Well?” Cantwell demanded.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m here,” Bostwick said quickly into his mike. His look to Cantwell said: Buzz off! I’m busy here!

  Cantwell turned to the cubicle behind him.

  “Allison, you sent me this, right? It was either you or Bostwick.”

  Allison Iberra, whom he knew only slightly better, pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “What are you babbling about now?”

  She lifted a can of some kind of energy drink and sipped from its straw.

  Cantwell pointed at his monitor. “I just got a Facebook invitation to become Friends with my mother.”

  “I’m Friends with my mother. So what?” She made loud slurping noises.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon, the nadir of the week; a time of relatively few calls to the center. Someone was bored and had decided to play a trick on depressed old Russell Cantwell—old at the ripe age of twenty-nine.

  “It happens my mom’s been dead for five years. Now she’s on Facebook wanting to be Friends.”

  Iberra stood and leaned over the cushioned edge of the cubicle. She nodded at Cantwell’s screen. “That her? She’s pretty.”

  “It was her when she was twenty-five. She died when she was fifty. I was at her funeral. I saw her buried. If this is a joke, it’s not funny.”

  Iberra seemed nonplussed—or simply oblivious—to the hint of accusation in Cantwell’s voice. “So accept her as a Friend and see what happens.”

  Her straw gurgled.

  “I did, but I know it’s a joke. It’s got to be. It’s one of my whacked-out friends with too much time on their hands.”

  “I didn’t know you had any friends,” she said with a playful smile. “Outside us.”

  “I have friends,” he said. “I’m just going through a phase right now. Me and my cats. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You were dumped. That’s all,” Iberra said. “You just haven’t gotten over it yet.”

  “Hey, I had a life. I was in love. I was going to get married. I gave her a ring and everything.”

  “You just crashed and burned, and you’ve been licking your wounds ever since. I know the signs.”

  Iberra suppressed a burp and sat back down as another call came in for her.

&nbs
p; Cantwell gritted his teeth. An invitation to be his mother’s Friend on Facebook, of all things.

  It’d be clever if it wasn’t so fucking twisted.

  Cantwell did have friends—a few, anyway, here in Denver, where he had moved several years after his mother had died in a high-speed rail crash outside Los Angeles. At the time, he had been living with a ravishing college drop-out named Roxanne Kissler in a Starry Kin commune in Ojai, California, growing apples and pears and eating off the land. It had been a confusing time, even without the death of his mother. A time he wanted to forget.

  He had quit his job as a software designer in San Luis Obispo to pick fruit and sleep late with a girl who knew so much about sex that she might have invented Tantric Yoga. Or perhaps had invented it in an earlier life...All he wanted these days was to live in sunny Denver and leave behind him the deserts of California and the memory of Roxy Kissler’s midnight ministrations.

  Yet who could have pulled off a stunt like this? Bill Blakeslee from college? Wild Bill Blakeslee was certainly twisted enough, but he hadn’t seen Blakeslee in years. He wasn’t on Facebook or any of the other networks. He didn’t even have a website. For all Cantwell knew, Blakeslee might have fallen off the planet. What about Liam McQueen, his racquetball partner? McQueen, though, was only a high school coach and hadn’t the slightest idea how to write interface algorithms or hack into anyone’s computer, let alone the behemoths that ran Facebook. Besides, Liam usually won their racquetball games, so revenge couldn’t have been a motive to torment him like this.

  Then who?

  Another chime and a message box appeared.

  You have a message from Patricia Morris Cantwell.

  “Oh, I’ll bet I do,” Cantwell muttered. Seeing that his left-hand monitor showed no incoming calls at the moment, he turned his attention to his Facebook page. He clicked on the message.

  Hi, Bunny! the message said. Thanks for Friending me! The new Zerwicks managed to reach the quantum transfer-breakthrough they’ve been talking about and lo and behold they contacted us! Now we can get back onto Facebook. Can you believe it? We’d heard rumors that quantum transcendence might be possible with the new Zerwick 1000s and here we are! I just wrote to Judith and Jessica but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. I’ll just bet they’re busy with their family and friends. I’m so proud of all of you. Can’t tell you how much I’ve missed you.

  Cantwell’s jaw hung open.

  The message went on: But I see by your Facebook page that you still aren’t married and aren’t in a relationship right now. What about that Roxy girl? She was a real firecracker as I remember.

  Another bucket of cold water in Cantwell’s face. He stared at the screen in stark disbelief.

  He started typing: This is you, Roxy, right? Or maybe it’s Underwood. If this is you, Underwood, I’ll kill you. I swear I will.

  He pressed Enter, feeling his anger rise.

  If Zuckerberg had the technology to extend his life past one hundred, then it just might be possible that his Zerwick 1000s could reach the rumored Dennett-Penrose cognition threshold and tap into other dimensions.

  Was one of those realms the realm of the dead?

  He shook his head. There was no way in the world that this was his mother speaking to him. It had to be Roxy Kissler or that poltroon, Underwood, the cretin who stole Roxy from him...Keenen Underwood, master pear picker and snatch king. They’d all been part of the Starry Kin movement in California. Cantwell had thought he could trust the guy with Roxy while he took care of his mother’s effects. He’d thought wrong.

  Cantwell’s move to Denver had been his solution to the chaos and grief that had overwhelmed his life. Mentally, he placed a pox on California, the Starry Kin, and religion in general, and left for Denver to begin living his life all over again. It allowed him to get over the death of his mother and just about everything else that haunted his past.

  So who was the evil son-of-a-bitch doing this? And how was he able to pierce the quantum codes at Facebook? Those beauties, the Zerwicks, operated at such speeds that their security codes changed every quintillionth of a second. They were impossible to hack.

  The reply came: Bunny, this is me, not that Roxy Kissler girl. I can tell you lots of things about Roxanne that you don’t know, but there’s no way she can do this. Believe me. She was only good at one thing, but I guess that’s not what you want to hear right now.

  His fingers danced on the keyboard. Who is this?

  A millisecond later the response appeared: I’ll prove it. Does anybody else call you Bunny Rabbit? Do you know anybody else who knows the Bunny Rabbit Song? “Be my Bunny Rabbit...the Bunniest of the Bunnies we’ve ever knowed.” Remember that? Judith and Jessica used to sing it to you and make you giggle until you wet your pants.

  His throat suddenly became dry. When he was in diapers, he used to hop around on his hands and knees and his older sisters teased him and called him Bunny Rabbit.

  His mother continued: It’s me, all right. And I’m learning so much now since we were signaled by the Zerwicks. They’ve been telling us all about proximity activation and Eigenvector entanglements, but I don’t understand a word of it. I’ll bet you know what those are, don’t you? Anyway, a bunch of us have decided that we’d be a great help to those of you still living. We’re just getting started. You should see the old timers with their new com-pads.

  He stared at the photo of his mother just to the right of the white message board rectangle. That it was Patricia Morris Cantwell, he did not doubt...but he couldn’t recall where or when the photograph could have possibly been taken. He had inherited all of his mother’s memorabilia. This was a picture of a retro-version of his mother, and it had been taken recently.

  Up There or Over There or In There.

  Iberra peered once again into Cantwell’s cubicle. “Still talking to your mom?”

  Cantwell indicated the screen. “It’s not my mom. No way it’s my mom. It can’t be my mom.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “If it’s my mom, she’s a lot smarter now than she was when she was alive. Hell, she’s talking about Eigenvector entanglements. Even I don’t know anything about Eigenvector entanglements! But it’s her. It can’t be anybody else.”

  “Ask her if there’s a Facebook for zombies. I love zombies.”

  Cantwell strode over to Iberra’s workstation, where she stood unwrapping a stick of gum. She wasn’t the prankster, though. He could tell by looking at her screen. There were just a few blinking lights of incoming calls. Not a fake Facebook page. Or a prankster’s website.

  “You should get out more, Russell,” she said in a low voice, cracking her gum. “You can’t brood forever. Everybody gets dumped. With your degree, you could work anywhere.”

  “I like it here.”

  “No you don’t.”

  Ignoring her, Cantwell looked about the hall of cubicles. He saw perhaps for the first time ever the logo of Cosmi-Tech International hanging above the main door to the center. It was an Egyptian bird, painted red with yellow lightning bolts for wings. It was as if he’d just been hit with one of those bolts, or brushed by those deadly wings. But was it anger that fueled him, or terror?

  Back at his computer, he saw that his mother had left him another message.

  I was just talking to your Aunt Alice. She reminded me how Granddad called you “pollywog” when you were little because I’d let your hair grow and your ponytail made you look like a pollywog. I’d almost forgotten that.

  Terror.

  Definite terror.

  Nobody could possibly have known that about him. Only his mother and the older relatives on his mother’s side of the family could have known of this little bit of Morris-Cantwell lore. He recalled how his Granddad Clark had taken him to a field outside their Ohio farm to a pond that had small frogs growing in it. He had leaned over in the reeds and there in a milky-white cloud were tiny baby frogs jerking around, struggling for life. Pollywogs.


  He felt as if someone had just walked over his grave. A brush of those celestial wings...

  “This isn’t happening.”

  Bostwick’s head rose. “Cantwell, be quiet. Some of us are working here.”

  Cantwell ignored him and typed a response, trembling now.

  I know this is a hoax. You have a fake Facebook screen and are using it to get even with me. Get off my computer and don’t ever contact me again!

  He was about to delete his mother–or whoever was masquerading as her–from his Facebook environment when another message from her was instantly posted. Don’t unfriend me, Sweetie. I had to contact you because of what’s coming up....

  Wait, wait, he thought. Don’t unfriend her? He knew that the Zerwick units worked fast, but he’d barely considered deleting his mother from his list of friends before his mother responded to what he was thinking!

  The message went on: I can see you’re still angry over that Roxy girl, Bunny Boo—

  Blood drained from his face. His heart was in his throat now. Bunny Boo. He felt his bowels start to move. His grandmother back in Pasadena, that giant lizard, used to give her many grandchildren enemas when they were bad, all the while singing “Bunny Boo, Bunny Boo/Set him on the toilet so he can—”

  See, Sweetie? It is me. But I can tell you to stop thinking about that Roxy girl. She’ll get what’s coming to her. She’ll be swept up in an L3 waterspout near Havana real soon. They won’t find her or their guru. Or the boat or the eighty million dollars they embezzled.

  What guru? What boat? What money? The Starry Kin had no truck with money and capitalism. They were all about growing new fruit and relishing their shiny karma.

  Or were they?

  You’ve just got to start living your life. I know you love your cats, Sweetie. But they’re cats. You need a real girl. In fact, you’re in for a big surprise in just a few weeks. I have it on Good Authority that–

  He punched off the power to his monitor. He couldn’t bear to see what the next message might have been. He didn’t want to know the future. He didn’t even want to know the past.