PodPooch (Cladespace Book 4) Read online

  “Thanks,” said Grace.

  “Glad you like it, honey,” said MariDora.

  Grace slurped coffee from the oversized porcelain mug, then stopped and added enough cream and sugar that it doubled as dessert.

  Beside her, Hitch pushed its sandbox closer, then crawled with its thumbs into the box and smoothed out the ripples. After this beautification ritual, it squiggled ‘welcome’ into the sand. The letters didn’t follow the precision of a computer: they looked like human printing.

  “Thank you, Hitch,” Grace said, wondering how much awareness it had. Did it only have sensors trained to the sand?

  Avonaco sat down across from Grace. “He likes you.”

  “Hitch?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he, um…” Grace considered. “How did he get to be—you know, the way he is?”

  “Someone had originally built an automaton using Markov chains, then added a gray grafty with someone else’s stored memories.”

  “A grafty?” Grace’s stomach churned as she tried to imagine how a human mind would react to living in something as limited as Hitch’s forearm.

  “You don’t think Hitch is worthy of a grafty?” Avo snapped.

  “It’s not that, it just seems so—”

  “I’m sure his dreams are just as vast as yours.”

  “Dreams? So he’s fully alive? An AI?” Grace asked.

  Hitch scrambled in the box, wiping away the welcome message and replacing it with ‘YES’ in big block letters.

  “Why do you have difficulty with the concept of sentience?” Avonaco huffed.

  “Sentience isn’t binary, dear,” MariDora said, picking up her empty plate. “More like a spectrum of living.”

  Grace, chagrined, took a long sip from her coffee. She considered Avonaco as she did. She hadn’t figured the kid out. He had deftly extracted her from ITB. He’d broken into their security network and somehow—she’d have to ask about this later—managed to evade the array of infrared sensors protecting the cellblock. He was keen to save Tim, and seemed to have a generally good opinion of Raj. Yet for some reason, Avonaco disliked her. The way he talked about Tim was as if he blamed her for his death. It made no sense. According to Avonaco himself, he’d never met Tim. Or Raj—in person, anyway. Yet the boy carried a grudge big enough for a team of steelbacks. Strange, strange child. She’d known plenty of children growing up cloister, but nobody like Avonaco.

  “Can we get you anything more?” MariDora asked.

  “No,” Grace said, putting down her cup. “Oh, actually, flapjacks!”

  “That was your second steak and eggs. Are you sure you have room for flapjacks?” MariDora’s voice held no reproach, just a motherly suggestion that perhaps her eyes were bigger than her gut.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  MariDora tapped her ptenda and nodded to Avonaco. The boy headed upstairs. Hitch began scooting his sandbox toward the stove.

  “Avonaco doesn’t like me,” Grace said quietly.

  “He’ll still bring down the flapjack batter,” said MariDora.

  Grace raised her eyebrows. She’d expected the friend of such a lad to offer some reassurance, or at least some kind of excuse.

  “I don’t want to cause you folks any trouble.” Grace finished her coffee and glanced at her ptenda. “There’s still a few hours until daybreak. I can stop by Bod Town and then go south toward Cheyenne before anybody—”

  “Don’t be stupid.” Avonaco’s voice erupted from the stairs. He closed the distance to the table and slammed a box of flapjack mix in front of MariDora. “Didn’t you pay attention to what I said?”

  “Avo…” MariDora placed a large, strong hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Well, hurry up and get used to it! You can’t just leave!” Avonaco folded his arms. “You’d be picked up before you even left the city. Every protector is looking for you; every loafer has your image in its engrams.”

  Avonaco sat down and glared at her. MariDora picked up the flapjack box and retreated to the stove. Grace followed with her eyes, wishing she had MariDora’s excuse.

  “I have to get into Bod Town and retrieve Tim’s crystal memory,” Grace said. “How exactly can I do that if I’ll be jumped by the first loafer we see?”

  “I do not know how,” Avonaco muttered. “Somebody is bound to recognize you.”

  “It could be a good thing,” Grace said.

  “Huh?”

  “A sighting, anyway. Spreading my name around the AI community. Raj was hoping for some support.”

  “You think AIs will jump out and protect you during a blind bang?”

  “All I’m saying is that one loafer might not be a problem. Not in Bod Town. It might even help us. And afterward, I’ll be getting out of Port Casper altogether.”

  Avonaco stared at the table, processing her words. He had a little crease between his brows. Grace sighed. She was usually good around kids.

  “Avonaco?”

  He looked up, still frowning.

  “I haven’t given you a proper thanks for breaking me out last night. May I give you a hug?”

  “Don’t touch me!”

  His eyes blazed in anger. Grace had battled murderous aposti, renegade protectors, and violent AIs, but she’d seldom seen such an expression of pure animus.

  “Well you’re a little monster, aren’t you.”

  Her words came without thinking, and the effect was as immediate as her regret. Avonaco raised a hand to his quivering mouth. His brown eyes filled with tears, tears that cascaded down his cheeks and dripped off his chin. Before Grace could reach out to comfort him, he had dashed up the stairs, and she ached at the long, low wail he cried as he disappeared.

  “I’m sorry, I—” She began to stand, then sat back down, the chair cushion wheezing out stale air. She sighed. He wouldn’t want her to follow.

  “That was unkind,” MariDora said as she deposited a plate of steaming flapjacks in front of Grace.

  “I know.” Grace rubbed her face with her hands. “I’m sorry. He seemed so angry, I just—I’m sorry. There was no excuse.”

  MariDora cocked her head and seemed to choose her next words carefully. “Avonaco had a difficult start in life. He hasn’t had the benefit of many friends. Just Djoser and Jaya, and we AIs at the Freer.”

  “Djoser Reynolds. Avonaco mentioned him.” Grace retreated into her food, placing pats of butter between the layers of flapjack and topping the stack with a river of maple syrup. “Some kind of scientist?”

  “Yes. He works on artificial intelligence.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In detention.”

  Of course, with Port Casper the way it was now. “And who was the other person?”

  “Jaya.”

  “Avonaco’s mother?”

  “No, Jaya is the one who brought him to Djoser.”

  “Had he run away from home?” It wouldn’t surprise her, given the boy’s strong will.

  “Sort of. Jaya found him about five kilometers outside of Slater, abandoned near a trading post. Later, Djoser became his adoptive father.”

  “What happened to his family?” Grace took a bite of syrupy flapjack and nearly swooned. She wished eating could be more mechanical, freeing up brainpower for the tasks at hand.

  “Avo never had parents. Whoever made him didn’t care for him.”

  Made him? It could have been a metaphor, but considering the company…

  “Made him?” Grace whispered, the fork paused at her lips.

  “Avo’s artificial. You did not know?”

  Grace’s full stomach dropped, and she put down the fork. “N-No. But I just made him cry, and he—”

  “That’s why I think he was abandoned: too human,” said MariDora. “He has the needs and emotions of a child, but the intelligence of an adult. Several adults. Whoever put him together wasn’t ready for such a being. Avonaco needed love, but how well do people react to children who are far smarter than they? How well do t
hey react when they find out a child is not human?”

  Grace blinked. Avonaco was an AI. But he didn’t seem like other AIs she’d met—like the twofers on Mars, or Hitch, or MariDora. He felt real. Grace shook her head. No, not real. That was the wrong word. MariDora was just as real, just as alive. Avonaco felt human. He had human responses, like Tim. Tim’s made sense, because he had once been a human—Eugene Bransen—until he’d been murdered. Avonaco had never been human. Or had he been?

  MariDora refilled Grace’s coffee cup. “Avonaco told me the folks in Slater hated him and labeled him a monster. Worse, there were other illegal synthetics who lived nearby—they shunned him, too. Didn’t like the fact that he could cry.” MariDora shook her head. “Avo had nobody, until Jaya came along.”

  “Who’s Jaya?”

  “A nomad.”

  “From the borderlands? They make them hard and tough out there,” said Grace. Now Raj’s choice made sense. If Jaya were willing to work with her, it’d be that much easier to sneak into cloister.

  “Perhaps,” said MariDora. “The important thing is that she saw something in Avo, understood what he needed. They spent two years together, living a nomadic life. But she got into a bad fight and took a bullet in the stomach. She came to Port Casper for treatment.” MariDora picked up the maple syrup bottle. “Died on the sidewalk outside the Freer. I was there. I saw it happen.”

  Died? Damn. “And that’s why Djoser took him in.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who watches him now? Does he go to school?”

  “I watch him, though he mostly looks after himself,” said MariDora. “As for school, he’s attended some shops at the Bod Town crèche, and it has helped with his socialization. But in a couple of years his lack of growth will cause questions we don’t want answered, even in a group as mechflesh as theirs.” Her gaze wandered toward the ceiling and the restaurant above. “He’s helped out in the diner some.”

  “What does he want to do?”

  MariDora looked back at Grace. She smiled. “Heal people.”

  “Heal?”

  “I think it is because Jaya died. He taught himself anatomy, and then began watching Doctor Chanho’s open learning medical videos. They began to correspond. Avonaco’s a good learner, when he is not… distracted,” said MariDora. “Another year and some more maturity, and he could set up his own practice. Remotely, of course.”

  “Will he get more maturity? Is he aging like a human?”

  “Mentally, yes, I believe he is.”

  Grace pushed away the remainder of her flapjacks. They were getting cold, and she wasn’t hungry anymore. She took a swig of coffee.

  “Avonaco’s already done a lot for me,” Grace said as she put the cup down. “What can I do for him?”

  “Acknowledge him. He is capable of more than what he’s done.” MariDora said. “That is why Doctor Chanho asked him to meet you at the spaceport.”

  “Did Raj help him plan my escape from ITB?”

  MariDora laughed. “No, that was all his idea. Oh, he ran some of it past me and Hitch—not so much as to get our blessings, but with the glee of a planner in love with the plan. I think…”

  MariDora’s lips quirked, and she abruptly stared at the table.

  “What?” Grace prodded.

  “Well, I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

  “What.”

  “He was disappointed that you weren’t dazzled by the zip line.”

  “Dazzled? I’m not afraid of heights.”

  “He’s still a child. What would you have done at eight, if you were trying to impress a protector?”

  Grace sighed. “I can’t believe I called him a monster.”

  MariDora touched her hand.

  “He will be fine.”

  Grace wondered if that were true. She had been a loner as a child, always felt estranged from most other kids, save Raj and his brothers. But Avonaco truly was different, and he’d always be different, and in the rising xenophobia of human space, he lived in the wrong place at the wrong time. If her response to his fear and anger was monster, what would the responses of other humans be?

  Chapter 8

  “What are you doing?” Grace asked Avonaco. The child was seated next to the medical pod, his fingers dancing across its main control panel. He paused momentarily during her question, then resumed without answering.

  Grace walked into the room, stepping over Hitch, who was diagramming something in his box for Avonaco. For a few heartbeats, she listened to the dual rhythm of their fingers—Hitch in his box, Avonaco on the keypad—and the corresponding chirps as the machine responded.

  “I’ve seen Raj fiddle with his medical pod a thousand times,” she ventured. “It always relaxed him.”

  Avonaco stiffened.

  “I am not fiddling.”

  “Sorry,” she said, but not the sorry she wanted to express. “I’ve been thinking about ways of smuggling myself out of Port Casper.” Coward, she thought, you’re avoiding the subject. “And I’m sorry for a lot of things—”

  “You know a typical disguise will not be enough,” he interrupted, ignoring her semi-apology. “Biometric scans would tag you after a few blocks. Your gait, posture, hand geometry: they would all betray you. I will have to alter your appearance—”

  “We’ll need a disguise that’s—”

  “—medically.”

  “No,” Grace gasped, growing cold. “I can change my appearance without the slicer, thank you very much.”

  “It will not be effective.”

  Grace crossed her arms. “A rogue protector once stuffed me in a medical pod programmed to cripple. I spent days in surgery to undo the damage. There’s no way I’m gonna get mangled just to get out of Port Casper. I’ll dig a tunnel, or blast myself from a cannon, or even parachute from a borderland blimp, but never—”

  “I knew you would not do it,” Avonaco huffed. “Even though you know how loafers work.”

  “It’s my body. My risk.”

  Avonaco shrugged. He pulled a chair over to a shelf and reached up, producing a wig of shoulder-length green hair.

  “Try this,” he said. “One of MariDora’s.”

  Grace pulled a scrunchie out of her jumper and put up her hair. She adjusted her new green mane overtop.

  Avonaco stretched out his hand. “Give me your ptenda.”

  “What? Oh.” Grace understood the request. At a distance, the ptenda could positively identify its owner. If the ptenda didn’t recognize her, the disguise was mango.

  She unclasped her ptenda, its blue display going dark as its bands released her wrist, and handed it to Avonaco. As he swiveled the ptenda to face her, Grace put the rest of her disguise into action. She let her jaw go slack and she moved her chin slightly to the left. She flared her nostrils and twitched one of her shoulders off-angle.

  The ptenda twinkled and pinged. After too short a time it unhelpfully replied: “Recognize Grace Donner.”

  “What if I put on fashion goggles? I could smear on conductive makeup like they wear in Bod Town.”

  “It would not be enough,” Avonaco interrupted. “And it is not like the ptenda has the fastest recognition software. The loafers patrolling the city are far more advanced. Your ptenda warbled in under two seconds. A loafer would identify you in a fraction of that time.”

  Hitch pawed the words ‘new clothes’ in his box.

  Avonaco shook his head.

  Grace pulled off the wig and threw it on the table. “Look, I’m not doing surgery. We’ll just have to find another way.”

  “There is no other—”

  “There’s got to be another way.” Grace’s thoughts pulsed, remembering the red marks on her face after her reconstruction. “I shouldn’t have to maim myself just to get home.”

  “Maim?” Avonaco held up his hands. “Nobody said anything about maiming. I would just make you look like somebody else. A cosmetic change to your face and your skin. Enough to satisfy the loafers.”
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  “Like somebody else? You alter me randomly, I’ll be an unregistered face. You make me into someone who exists, I’ll register in two places at once. So tell me. Who exactly do you want me to look like?” Grace slapped the top of the table.

  “Jaya,” Avonaco whispered. An emotion flickered across Avonaco’s face, too rapid to register.

  “Jaya?”

  “It is the only complete body scan that I have,” Avonaco said. “Except for me. And everybody knows me. Plus your skull is too large to morph into mine.”

  “But…” Grace paused. “Isn’t she registered as dead?”

  “No. She is still in the system.”

  Cold sweat chilled her chest. He was asking her to have her face sliced up and pulled back together in the guise of somebody she didn’t know. But it was someone he loved. She wondered what it cost him to offer that.

  “How permanent would it be? Would Raj be able to put me back together?”

  Avonaco frowned. “Doctor Chanho is more skilled than I in cyborg surgery, and I would defer to him on facial reconstruction.”

  “I don’t like the idea,” she said, her gaze shifting to Avonaco while grasping for another excuse. “And I don’t think you would appreciate me looking like Jaya.”

  Avonaco pinched his eyes shut. “It does not matter if you look like Jaya. You would not be her.”

  Here was this synthetic child, shaking with the memory of his lost friend. She remembered what it was like, to hold Tim in her arms as the blue gel drained from his body, as his chassis fell slack. The boy was mourning for the loss of a human in the same way she mourned Tim. It wasn’t an easy choice for him, either. And they were, she admitted to herself, desperate.

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “But… I’ll do it.”

  Avonaco cocked his head and studied her. “I can help you with some of the anxiety.” He tapped the control panel. “Here, climb in while I put together a drug injector.”