The cold self-loathing enveloped her as Sibal smiled. I’m not equipped to deal with torture, dammit. The thought did not comfort her.
The clone was a man from the Pan Pacific United countries, and she needed to do three hatchet jobs on three copies of his mindmap. The lab had multiplied him before, but never hacked him. Hating herself, Maria dutifully cut open the personality and memories of what seemed an innocent enough clone, and made three of him. Each lacked empathy, had a narcissistic superiority complex, and showed a doglike obedience to Dr. Sibal. She had considered making them homicidal to whoever woke them up, but it seemed the doctor was expecting such back doors, and warned her against inserting them.
She often worked into the night, her guards watching her. They would get bored from time to time, and read, or even doze, leaning against the door. Neither had a weapon she could steal, and both of them were large enough to overpower her even if she attacked while they slept. But they knew little enough about cloning so that they couldn’t tell when she wasn’t doing what she was told, and she banked on that.
She did her hatchet as best she could, but one late night as her guard dozed, Maria slipped her own mindmap drive out of her bracelet and plugged it into the computer. She hadn’t made a backup in weeks; this was last made on Earth, at a more innocent time.
Maria had never hacked herself before. She knew her profession was always dangerous and sometimes unethical (and this time very unethical), but the real thing holding her back was her refusal to look back at her own memories and personality. There was a lot you could deny about yourself, but you couldn’t argue with a mindmap. This time, though, she wasn’t there to argue with it.
If she couldn’t put a yadokari into hatchet jobs, she would put one in herself.
Hacking yourself was like tickling yourself. It was hard to do because while the mind is gullible when being fooled by things such as illusion and misdirection, it is surprisingly robust against a direct onslaught. And it’s hard to fool yourself with your own magic trick.
There is also the worry about royally fucking up your own mind. Maria was one of the best, but there were reasons why even the best doctors didn’t treat themselves or their families.
She couldn’t just put information in her own head. She would wake up, panicked that she was going mad, and not know what was real. She had to go in sideways.
Maria decided to re-create her imaginary friend. She had seen the holo-experience horror film Perkins’s Estate Sale when she was too young for it, and it had scared her to death—but the heroine, the elderly billionaire played by the dark-skinned American Latina actress Sophia Gomez, had seemed so strong and comforting to young Maria. She went about punishing her grandsons for trying to kill her and take her estate like a grandmother armed with a stern, no-nonsense attitude, and a chain saw.
Maria wanted Mrs. Perkins to be her grandmother. Whenever she was afraid of the dark as a child, she would imagine Mrs. Perkins saying, “When you walk up that dark road to my house” (the imaginary Mrs. Perkins lived up the road from Maria, past where the streetlights stopped), “you can’t see the monsters, Lucero. That’s true. But you know what? The monsters can’t see you, neither.”
So adult Maria began to give her Mrs. Perkins a bit more personality and opinions and, most important, information. Her old imaginary friend took form and lived tucked away in the mindmap of Maria’s subconscious where she waited with some key bits of information about Dr. Sibal, his Luna lab, his goals, and, crucially, her memories of this experience. She funneled as much data as she dared straight into Mrs. Perkins.
Triggering Mrs. Perkins would be more complicated. Hiding a packet of important data in your subconscious mind was one thing, but accessing it was something else. The subconscious wasn’t so easily accessed, like a mental grocery store that’s closed except from three to four a.m., and with a key you had to find in the dark. Maria stared at her own code, trying to figure out how to tell her next clone to find Mrs. Perkins.
She didn’t want to tie Mrs. Perkins to a dream. That was too risky; future clones might not believe the dream, or might put Mrs. Perkins in a bear suit watching Maria forget her lines on stage. She needed a powerful trigger to bring Mrs. Perkins to the forefront of her mind.
Then, eyes aching from the strain of staring at a bright screen, she laughed. The strongest non-stressful memory trigger was scent. And every time she woke up a new clone, the first thing she did was go for comfort food.
Coquito acaramelado—her aunt used to make them for snacks on special occasions. Coconut and sweet milk and caramel—sometimes chocolate—but the smell was like a blanket wrapping around Maria. It was love and safety and what she needed when she was newly woken and dealing with the slight disorientation new clones experienced.
When she lived in Miami, Cuban street vendors selling sweets were plentiful. But she had moved to Firetown, New York City, to be closer to Sallie Mignon if she needed her. This limited her comfort food options, so she usually just made her own.
She put a thin thread of code attached to the redolent smell of coquito acaramelado and tied it to the mental box containing her new Jiminy Cricket. No one had figured out how to code a legitimate AI and implant it into a person, but Maria had to wonder if Mrs. Perkins was the closest yet.
As thrilled as she was with her creation, she hated the irony knowing no one would ever realize her achievement. She may never know it herself.
During the day she continued her hatchet job on the poor mindmaps of the man she was turning into a psychopath. During the evening, she worked on her own mindmap, making Mrs. Perkins into a stronger persona.
When she said she was done with the assigned mindmaps, two days before Sibal’s deadline, he locked her into the small office that had been converted to a sleeping space for her. She didn’t mind that much, taking time to recover from the mental and physical exhaustion. Every day she would wake up and touch the drive on her bracelet to make sure it was there. She slept and read for the next two weeks, so tired she couldn’t even get bored. Or feel guilty. That would come later, she was sure. Mrs. Perkins would see to it.
One day Dr. Sibal walked into her room, smiling. “The job is done. You did very well. I may have to employ you again.”
Maria thought of several snarky things to say, but just winced as the gun came up. “Make it qui—” she said before he shot her.