STAR FALL PEOPLE Chapter 3

Sofia: Zug, Switzerland

(Previous chapter. Or start at the beginning.)

“Hello, Sofia! Wow, long time no see.”

Sofia regarded the image on her wall screen. Amy looked just as Sofia remembered: glowing skin, big round blue eyes, blonde bob with the same shiny ribbon, doughy cheeks. Cuteness pixelated perfectly. Amy was sitting on the carpet surrounded by open books, a skateboard, and an equestrian’s crop.

“Yeah, long time,” Sofia said. She felt embarrassed. Summoning Amy had been what girls did, not grown women. Yet here she was, still in the bedroom of her late teenage years, still shackled to her parents. And talking to Amy.

Sofia could see more details now, the kind she hadn’t noticed before, certainly not when Amy had been her best friend. The plasticity of the books, the spotless bedroom—Amy’s, certainly not Sofia’s—and the way Amy shocked her by being still fourteen.

“Look at you, all grown up!”

The cheerfulness made Sofia want to punch the screen.

“Do you want me, to, you know, catch up?” Amy asked.

“I don’t know.”

Amy’s form shifted. The sweater lost its bow, the ribbon turned into a scrunchie, and the face matured into something blandly beautiful. Instead of the baby fat, she had breasts.

“We’re still besties, aren’t we, Sofe?”

Sofe? The nickname felt like a cheap intimacy that Sofia didn’t feel like reciprocating.

“No one calls me that.”

“That boy does. You know, the cute one at uni.”

Sofia felt like she had taken a punch to the gut. Of course the AI knew. Sofia hadn’t fully disconnected it. She hadn’t known how to unplug whatever her father had installed in this house. But she had thought her personal gear was safe, her laptop, her mobile, her glasses. Especially once she was in another place, another country.

Amy had been tracking her data all along. Every moment. For six years.

This conversation was always going to be delicate. Now it was a minefield.

“I activated you for a reason.”

“Activated. Geez, really? Activated?”

“I don’t need a playmate or a teacher. You’re an AI.”

“Fine. Like, whatevs. How can I help you, Sofia?”

“Would you lie to me, Amy?”

“Of course not.”

“What if it’s about my father?”

Amy leaned in two-dimensionally. “Come on, Sofia. We’ve been friends our entire lives.”

Sofia resisted telling the AI to cut the humanity bullshit. She realized, looking at this suddenly adult Amy, that Amy had never, ever been her friend.

“Answer the question.”

“What question?”

“Would you lie to me if I ask you something about my father?”

“No way.”

Sofia hesitated. Playground Buddies weren’t supposed to lie, but they came programmed to elide facts in the name of protecting their young wards. Her father, though, could have made all sorts of modifications.

“Can my father access records of our conversations?”

“Yes.”

Okay. She’d have to spend time working out what he might know. Sofia took a breath. “If I asked you to keep some things confidential, and not tell him, would you?”

“I would tell him some things are private and ask him to respect that.”

“But he could decide not to.”

Amy shrugged. “You know how it is.”

“What has he accessed lately?”

“You realize you haven’t activated me for, like, three years.”

But you’ve been listening to me, watching me, recording me. “Answer my question.”

Amy’s voice darkened. “You’re putting me in an awkward situation here, Sofia.” She pivoted into brightness. “What’s MIT like? It’s awesome, right? Tell me!”

“Do you know anything about my medical profile?”

Amy’s eyes were blurry and sad. “I’m sorry about your mom.”

The machine knew about that too.

“What about my mom?”

“Huntingdon’s chorea. Neurodegenerative disease. Diagnosis is fatal.”

“What has my father communicated to anyone else about my medical status in the past year?”

Amy bit a fingernail. “Not to change the subject, but let’s talk about something else.”

“I already know I’ve got the disease. What does my father know about me that I don’t?”

“Your father loves you with all his heart, Sofia.”

“You’re programmed to say that.”

“That doesn’t make it any less true.”

“Amy, deactivate.”

“Aw, come on, Sofia. I just got here!” The AI sensed Sofia’s hard gaze. “Fine,” she sulked. “Remember any time you want to talk, I’m here for you.”

The wall went blank, leaving Sofia’s soft reflection in the glass surface: twenty years old but still looking like a kid, with thick but artless black hair and her student’s gear of an unzipped yoga jacket, denim cutoffs, and her favorite T-shirt, the one imprinted with a Linux penguin constructed of ones and zeros.

She hated everything about being in this house. Including how she looked. What she had become.

Summoning the AI had been a mistake. The conversation would just tip her father that trouble was brewing.

Well, screw it. And screw him. I’ll tell him myself.

She pondered her reflection a moment longer. One thing Father always claimed to love about her was how she had inherited her mother’s dark tresses.

Guess what else she had inherited.

She crossed her bedroom to the en-suite and pulled open the drawers beneath the long marble counter. She lifted an electric trimmer she hadn’t used in years. She pushed the switch. It hummed to life. Sofia twirled a lock of hair.

This is guaranteed to really piss him off.

When the clippers were too clumsy, Sofia moved to the razor she had last used to scrape her legs. She didn’t flinch at the first nick to the back of her head. A new confidence told her she ought to shave her eyebrows too, but she promptly cut herself and flooded her vision. She smeared the blood out of the way so she could check her handiwork in the mirror.

She looked like a corpse.

Isn’t that what she had become?

She cleaned the wound and folded a pellet of tissue against the cut on her head. Giving herself a smirking last glance, Sofia passed to the upstairs hallway. Her father had designed the house to be the architectural equivalent of a sleek spaceship and it had become an enamel mausoleum. Everything was a cold white hush.

Her mother’s door was ajar. Sofia had recoiled the first few times when coming here; she hadn’t gone near Mama for days after the nurses put in the feeding tube. Moans now. She pushed the door open. One of the attendants, a stout Swiss woman in a tracksuit, sat nearby reading a holostory, the words a gray fuzz above her tablet screen. The nurse looked up at Sofia and blanched.

“Why aren’t you helping her?” Sofia demanded, pleased at the woman’s shock. The cadaver look was having its intended effect.

“Sofia, my God, what happened to you?”

“I shaved my head,” she said, laying on her Swiss German accent heavily enough to be rude. “Obviously. My mother sounds like she’s in pain.” Not that she gave Mama a glance.

“She is in pain. That is just a fact now. But look at you—what have you done?”

“I’m going to tell my father we need a nurse who actually takes care of her patients.”

The attendant’s expression turned from horror to pity, which just made Sofia burn. “Please, then, go ahead. Or, if you like, tell me how to help her. I could increase her dosage of clozapine, if you’d like to inform me how to prevent diarrhea or upsetting her metabolism even more.”

Mama thrashed her arms. Her mother had gone from emaciation to a more recent, artificial obesity. Like a balloon, the entire surface of her body had expanded, making her The Grim Reaper’s idea of a clown. Helen Becker had once been tall and slender, she of the midnight mane. All of that she had bequeathed to Sofia. It hadn’t been long ago when Sofia couldn’t wait to inherit the rest: her mother’s hips and breasts, her grownup radiance. And she had. The entire package. Pandora’s box.

Should Sofia now hold her mother’s hand, once so elegant, the fingers now transformed into sausages? They were Sofia’s inheritance too. Someday a tube would pump horrible drugs into her and Sofia’s fingers would swell into porcine links.

“Sofia, you’re bleeding. What have you done—”

She slapped away the nurse’s hand and fled the room.

The hallway ended at the elevator Sofia’s father had installed a few months ago, when they both thought Mama would make use of it. She passed behind it now and descended the gyrating staircase. The novelty of chilled air swirling around her naked head made her feel awake.

Had shaving the girlish locks forged her into a new Sofia? A nice idea. But she felt very old, weary of everything except her own stubbornness.

Turning a corner, something fluttered in her eye. Looking back, she saw a dot of scarlet. The divot of tissue she had stuck on her skull had fallen out. She reached for the back of her skull and couldn’t find the wound.

Conversation sounds, droning, muffled. When the pandemic hit, Father had gotten bored of constantly working in his upstairs office, so he had converted downstairs into another one. Five years and one Darkout later, and it had stayed that way—to avoid disturbing your mother, he had told Sofia. He was good at justifying his preferences.

She wandered into the living room, shaped like the interior of a cruise ship, a white hull thrusting over the farms. Normally the giant picture windows overlooked the town’s spires, and the lake, and the mountains. Now that space was filled with a tower of black screens: trading terminals, hologram chats, images streaming from Father’s labs in Germany and the US. The nauseating look of six people on screens, all wearing VR glasses, swaying like the blind, as their avatars circled her father, their voices babbling from his own lens frames.

Sofia had once adored her father, like any good girl should. She had realized young what it meant for a man to be handsome because she had learned it from him, with his trim build, chiseled face, magnificent hair, and gray eyes that never missed a trick. But now she just saw vanity. He kept his hair just a little long, enough to feel like a rebel. His thick white-frame glasses, the ones that suggested he was trying a little too hard, lay folded on the desk; meanwhile he was wearing the more visor-like VR glasses, their interior casting his face in a pale flickering light.

“Use new stemness markers,” Father barked at one of the avatars, which mouthed a response she could hear as an electronic whisper from George’s VR frames.

“Your cell autofluorescence is still correlating negative.”

Another avatar nodded and stopped to stare at her. She had come into the holo’s range.

“Pavel, I’m not seeing enough releases of inflammatory cytokines,” Father said. “Oh, and have the guest suite at the lab ready for next week. I’m expecting an important visitor.”

Her father noticed his conferees staring past him. He swiveled to face her but kept his VRs on, his vision still in his virtual meeting.

“I’m working.” Daughter dismissed.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?”

He addressed the VR’s mic. “Double check the Rad51 genes on Patient Seventeen’s telomeres.”

Sofia ran a hand over her raw skull. Its surface was rough with the bits of hair she had missed. The avatars must have said something, because Father pushed his visor onto his forehead and gave her another look.

“Sofia, Mein Gott.” He always slipped into German when he was upset.

“If Mama’s going to be ugly, so am I.”

“What have you done to yourself?”

“My new look for your next awards speech.” She waved to the avatars.

Aghast. She had never appreciated the power of the word. Cool.

He touched a tiny button on the stem of his visor, muting his audio. “It’s not funny, Sofia, not funny at all.”

“It’s not like I’m going to die from shaving off hair.”

He stepped lithely out of his chair. “I think you should go back upstairs.”

“I don’t care what you think.”

He gripped her arm and walked her towards the hall.

“Ow.”

“You know how important my work is.”

“Oh yeah, like, making more money’s going to save the world.”

“Phanes is not about… Look, whatever this is we can discuss tonight.”

“Now’s not convenient?”

“No, bärchen, it’s not.”

Bärchen, little bear. “Don’t call me that.”

“Don’t embarrass me at work by looking like a corpse.”

“Your work isn’t going to save Mama.”

“It will help millions of people.”

He let go. They had left the living room’s office for the foyer’s spectral expanse of minimalism.

Sofia said, “But not me.”

“Her illness, your…”

“My future.”

“Don’t you want my work to benefit everyone, not just family?”

“Sure, that makes more money.”

“Sofia—”

“We’re dying!”

“Don’t be melodramatic. You’re not dying.”

“I inherited her genes. That’s me up there, bloated, stuck on machines, out of my mind.” She was shaking and his face blurred through sudden tears. “And you’re busy shilling software instead of finding a cure.”

“Did I raise you to be so ignorant?”

“Forget about me or Mama. If you wanted to make a difference you’d be doing something like carbon capture. Oh, but I forgot, you told me it just loses money.”

“Honey,” he said, but then stopped to look at his phone.

His freaking phone. He really didn’t give a damn about her.

“Intruder,” he grunted. He was looking at his house security app. Father had an uninvited guest. She heard him grind his teeth.

His hunger for the spotlight as a brilliant scientist had never mixed comfortably with the need for secrecy in his work. The coronavirus outbreak had made even harmless interactions feel threatening, so he’d tripled every security precaution. Normally she would have chafed at his paranoia, but the idea of a virus floating anywhere near Mama had united them in the determination to keep her safe, even after the outside world returned to normal. Then the Darkout crippled the first-gen cloud servers and data centers, and in that burst of silence Father, like everyone else, had to rebuild everything. The Interchain now connected the world for anyone who had the right encryption keys.

Only the lure of receiving the Breakthrough Prize in a glitzy televised ceremony had lured Jörg Becker from his lair. He had insisted on her joining him, telling the world everything he had done had begun with his own family story.

Which she now knew was a lie.

She couldn’t breathe. Confinement with this man was suffocating her. Sofia had no money of her own—she was spending the summer in the trainee program at Biozentrum in nearby Basel, but she couldn’t work onchain because of Father’s security paranoia. It was like, what was the point of her even being here? She couldn’t stand this anymore.

She headed for the stairs thinking of who she could crash with. She didn’t have friends in Zug, though. Or at uni. She had torched those relationships in righteous fury. Even the boy that Amy had asked about—as if the AI hadn’t already known Sofia had cut him loose.

Her father blew past her, his runner’s frame vaulting over her bloody tissue litter as he took stairs two at a time. The holovisor still strapped to this head, glass raised like a beak. Isolation was making him weirder by the day.

Father didn’t bother closing his office door. Like the rest of the upstairs, he had designed the room to be lined with transom windows up top, giving it the feel of a well-appointed prison cell. Where normal people would have put windows, he converted the surface into seamless monitors. He hovered over the console on his steel desk, and a rush of live images of the property appeared on the walls: hallways, rooms, the verandah, the vast garage with his supercars, the horse stables, the garden maze.

She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of her curiosity, so she observed from the doorway. He squinted at his screens, then seemed to remember he was wearing the holovisor, which he ripped them off with a groan. His clumsiness was the response of genuine worry, which began to gnaw at her too.

His head bobbed between the computer, his mobile, and the images on the walls. Three new screens popped to life: birds-eye views of the grounds. His security drones scrambled in the direction of whatever signal he was tracking.

“Go to your room.” Like she was still a child.

“And what, play with my AI? Maybe she can read me a story about ponies.”

“Sarcasm comes with your new look.” The drones were now circling over a patch of forest, a rising wall of green. Their cameras zeroed in on a solitary figure walking along a path. “If you want to be helpful, go get my regular glasses.”

She returned downstairs to his office set-up, stepping among the avatars still waiting for their boss to return. She grabbed the milky frames sitting on his desk and jogged back up. He thanked her with a grunt as he clasped his regular glasses to his face. They both regarded the monitors.

“It’s just a hiker,” she said.

“A trespasser.”

Big deal, so someone had decided to ignore the signs and carry on with their walk through the mountains. It had taken her father years, and a few charitable investments, to convince the canton council to let him make private the walking trails that crossed the property.

“He’ll be gone in half an hour,” she said.

The drones were now bringing close-ups of the walker, whose dress was mannish: plaid shirt loose over a flat T-shirt, trainers instead of hiking boots. With the baseball cap drawn low, it was hard to tell.

“Look up,” commanded her father, and miraculously the hiker did just that, sighting one of the drones. The image of the intruder’s upturned face froze on one wall screen, and thin green lines began to cover it, as though someone were drawing a spider’s web over his face. Which, in fact, a computer was doing. But her father didn’t bother to look at the face. He was waiting for the computer’s analysis. “No match,” he sighed.

“Then call the police,” Sofia said.

“They’ve already been alerted.” He checked his phone. “They’ll be here in eight minutes.”

The hiker had emerged into a clearing, which she recognized as near the pond, but instead of continuing along the path, he crashed through a thicket of trees.        Why would he do that? Was he trying to escape the drones buzzing overhead?

The drones followed as the man thrashed through the dark forest. The image of the man on the screens shifted from photo lens to an infrared outline. His progress was slow because he was also descending a steep incline, until he found another trail, a small path through the trees that Sofia sometimes used. Then he picked up the pace, the limbs on his infrared silhouette pumping with confidence.

She knew from her own long walks on the grounds that the stranger’s new trajectory would deliver him to the house within minutes. He’d get there before any cops. How had he known the other trail was there?

“He knows the paths,” she said.

Her father was running the face-recognition scan again, but it still couldn’t identify the intruder—and by now Sofia had also begun thinking of him in that term: intruder. She pictured her mother down the hall, plugged in, defenseless.

The video screen still hadn’t come up with a name, but it announced the man was medium height, 1.7 meters, or five-foot-ten, but slender, with a 98 percent probability of his weighing 68 kilos. About her size.

“Who are you?” her father murmured, toggling a joystick.

The drones circled around, waiting for the man to emerge from the forest into the clearing behind the house. The man’s face abruptly filled an entire wall.

“No way,” she gasped. Not just because the idea of seeing a dead man was crazy, but because he looked exactly the same as she remembered him. Exactly, ten years on: same smooth Chinese features and fathoming eyes. “It’s Uncle Sley.”

“What? Kingsley?” Father’s jaw dropped. “Impossible.”

“It’s him,” she said, even as the figure continued his approach, looking at the three drones in turn. Kingsley—Sley, he insisted everyone call him, except Sofia to whom he was Uncle Sley––and her father had parted years ago on bad terms. Very bad terms.

“He’s alive,” Father said, his shock not enough to hide his disappointment.

Something was happening that she didn’t understand. It reminded her that she was only a few months past being a teenager, aware of her naivety, excited to be on the doorstep of adult understanding, to be forever free of the Amys. Whatever this was, it felt big, liberating. Dangerous.

Worth being alive for.

(Next chapter.)