“Briefly,” Maria said. “There wasn’t much of a spark there. But damn, he could paint.”
“I was pondering doing a patronage program to fund artists’ cloning efforts,” Sallie said. “We were going to support them and clone them so they could continue creating. But Jerome said it sounded like indentured servitude.” She made a face.
“It does kind of sound like you want them to keep creating, but if they quit, then you won’t clone them anymore.”
“That’s a bit extreme. And how can you stop a creator from creating? I found different places to put my money.”
Maria finished getting dressed. She left her bedroom and saw Sallie in front of another Fogarty original, this one properly on a canvas. Sallie pointed back to the on-the-wall art piece. “Is that why you haven’t moved?”
“It’s one reason,” she said. “Other reasons include I started sprucing the place up when I started making money, and then realized if I left, I’d have to set a new place up with all these measures. So I just stayed. Makes me less of a target for theft, so long as I keep my head down.”
“And doesn’t make people assume you’re a wealthy hacker either,” Sallie said.
Maria grinned. “That too.” She held her hand out. “Now, let’s look at this DNA matrix.”
After two hours of studying the code that made Jerome’s mindmap, Maria identified the genetic anomaly that led to later-life MS. She inserted code to comment out the data and cleaned up around it so the new DNA wouldn’t try to grasp onto a missing strand.
“Why don’t you just delete it?” Sallie asked.
“Too dangerous. Anyway, commenting out the code means that it’s still there, so if I mess something up, I can revert to the old code.”
“So you don’t keep backups?”
Maria kept her eyes on the screen. “No, keeping backups of peoples’ maps for personal use is unethical. My clients get back all the data they gave to me.”
She offered Sallie a beverage while she took a break, and rubbed her eyes as the coffee brewed.
“Thank you for doing this,” Sallie said, looking tired and a little wide-eyed. “You are as good as people said you are.”
“Thank you,” Maria said, getting mugs.
“I’m curious,” Sallie said. “While you’re in there, can you change a few other things?”
“Depends on what it is, but sure.”
“Make him love me more. Make him never cheat on me again. Make him not be angry that I cloned him,” Sallie said bitterly.
Maria turned in surprise, blanching at the pain on Sallie’s face. “He hasn’t consented to the cloning?”
“Not yet. He’s going to die soon, and he’s worried we will have problems when he is twenty-five again and I’ll still look in my fifties. Never mind that I reminded him I am much older than he is. He doesn’t understand.”
Maria shook her head. “Most don’t, until they’ve been cloned.” She paused, chewing on her lip. “Are you serious, about those things you want?”
Sallie returned from her anguish for a moment and wiped at her eyes. “Do you think you can do something that intricate? I didn’t think it was actually possible.”
Maria shrugged uncomfortably. “Not many people can do it. It’s what I do best, though, which is why I’m still doing it on the black market. I can do a lot of what you asked for. Not everything. Every hack I do to a personality is dangerous, though. Cutting out the MS from a matrix was easy. Messing with a person’s sense of self, their emotions, that’s more complex. It’s risky.”
Sallie stared at the numbers on the screen, flashing different colors in a language that Maria knew well. She nodded, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Do it.”
Maria turned back to the terminal and hunted again through the terabytes of information, looking for love, infidelity, and forgiveness. She began to program the changes to Sallie’s partner.
At this point, she wasn’t in a position to judge her clients.
But she never saw that vulnerable, teary-eyed version of Sallie again.
119 Years Ago
October 1, 2374
The reporter was young and white, with a Roman numeral I tattooed on her wrist. This was the fad of the time, where humans liked to show via tattoo that they were the first of a long line, intending on being cloned on their death. It was like calling something the first annual celebration. You can’t have a first until you have a second.
Maria hadn’t wanted to come to this meeting. But she’d been on retainer for Sallie Mignon for almost a hundred years, and had amassed quite a bit of wealth. She did what Sallie asked.
The reporter had tattoos on her face, another luxury of the non-clone lifestyle. She had a star on her left cheek and half of her head was shaved, with more stars along her scalp. Her right side had long, straight blue hair.
She’d been brazenly writing on both sides of the clone riots, crowing about being balanced with her reporting, but not hesitating to dig up very old dirt on some prominent clones. Annoying as she was, she was as good at doing research as Maria was hunting through mindmap code. Sallie had put her on the payroll because she admired her moxie.
Her name was Martini, and that’s what she drank, the finest vodka that Sallie could buy. After the drinks arrived (whiskey for Sallie and Maria), Sallie smiled pleasantly. She got out her tablet and pulled up the front page of the New York Times. TERRORIST CLONES RIOT WORLD-AND LUNA-WIDE, DOZENS INJURED IN ATTEMPT TO SABOTAGE NEW GENERATION STARSHIP DORMIRE: LAUNCH DELAYED POSSIBLY BY YEARS blasted across the front, with a picture of Luna taken from outside the dome. Someone had been murdered messily on the other side, close enough to splatter blood on the synthetic diamond structure.
Some Pulitzer-seeking photojournalist had ventured outside in an enviro suit just to get that photo.
“What went wrong here?” Sallie asked Martini.
Martini shrugged. “Clones don’t like that humans get to colonize the new planet. They rioted, tried to bust up the ship. Didn’t you read the story?”
Maria hid a grimace behind her glass. This woman hadn’t been in Sallie’s employ long enough to discover what to say and, more important, what not to say.
“I mean, I don’t control the news. How do clones expect to come back from that and still look like the good guys?” she continued.
“I pay you to control the news,” Sallie said. “How you do it, I don’t care. But you tell the story that benefits clones on a large scale, me on a small scale. There are tens of thousands of clones, many of us working well within humanity’s laws. And we were working to get a server on that ship so that clones may travel to Artemis as well. And yet your paper labels us terrorists.”
“But—” Martini said, but Sallie was on a roll.
“Extremist individuals live inside every single group on the planet. Devout followers from Christian to Muslim who kill in the name of God, down to people who perpetuate a cycle of abuse from parent to child. And do you know at what point they’re labeled as terrorists?”