Reductio ad Absurdum

It rained the day Mother married Jek. A bad omen, they say, but it seemed appropriate. God wept for her that day, knowing, as I did, that it would be her last.

Neither of us slept much the night before the ceremony. I woke early to find Mother already up -- in the parlor at her baby grand, tapping ivory notes into the moist spring-morning air. She'd been crying, though she tried to hide it. When she noticed me watching her, she smiled.

"Don't look so upset, Savr," she said with a sniff. "It's a happy day, don't you think? You should be happy."

She brushed away new tears with shaking fingers.

"It's not too late," I said. "You don't have to go through with this. You could ask him to wait. If he loves you, he'll wait."

She laughed as she closed the fallboard. "It's okay. This is what I want, too! It's just pre-wedding jitters. Don't worry -- you worry about me too much."

She raised a hand to brush my cheek, and I felt the prickling of her halo on my skin. Her distress found voice there. Anyone who really looked could have seen it, whispering through the restless, milky haze of utility fog shrouding her skin. But I was the only one to notice; to suspect that maybe she, too, understood how things would end.

Looking back, it's clear this was all Anya's fault. The day my mother fell in love with Jek was the day she fell in love with Anya, too. The parties' mutual affection precluded issues of jealousy, so the only difficulties they faced were logistical. There was only one of each of them to go around, but each of them had two lovers vying for attention. Sharing, Jek often complained, was awkward. Everyone agreed that, if things were going to work, two-thirds of the relationship would need to be reduced. Since Anya had a problem with commitment, it only made sense that it should be the two-thirds including my mother.

Apart from the rain, the wedding ceremony was beautiful, with cake and presents and throngs of people I had never met, all jostling to wish the newly betrothed well. They exchanged the usual vows, promising to love one another, to share one flesh, and to be reborn in one another's lives. Their reception party lasted well into the night, and when it was over, a carriage with white horses whisked them away to their honeymoon appointment, where they would be joined in flesh as well as in spirit.

What returned, the following day, sealed my dread.

He called himself Lassr, by prior agreement of the betrothed, and he seemed to be everything they had wanted to be together: olive-skinned, with hair like dusk and eyes like diamonds. Beautiful by every outward measure. Practiced in every convention of elegance. I loathed him. It was clear to me which side of the union he favored most.

I don't know what they did with the old bodies. I'm told they grind them up and use them as a nutritive substrate for the new one's growth. Somehow, the prospect of this abomination feasting on my mother's flesh did nothing to endear him to me. And the smile he flashed me at his homecoming party only made me hate him more. That was Jek's smile, with nothing of my mother in it.

I tried to put it out of my mind. But life was hardly normal with him and Anya living in our house, sleeping in Mother's room without Mother. Friends and relatives repeatedly assured me that she was there, wrapped into that composite being by biological matrimony.

"You're not a substrate bigot, are you?" my grandfather asked me. "I can't believe my Lassr would raise such a narrow-minded boy."

My Lassr. It appalled me that even Mother's own parent could somehow overlook her absence in this new being. He called her by that name, as though he'd forgotten her old identity entirely. It seemed as though she'd been wiped from the tablet of our family's collective memory by some revisionist historian who insisted she had never been a person on her own.

Disgust boiled my blood. How could they be so blinded by this thing that had come along and stolen her from us? He had her memories -- you could ask him any question you wanted to satisfy yourself that he knew her life as his own. But memories were things easily exchanged. I concerned myself more with the fact that he had nothing of her soul in him. Never since the wedding had I felt her in his touch, heard her in his voice nor seen her in his eyes.

And never since the wedding had I seen him anywhere near Mother's piano. For the better part of a month, that treasured baby grand stood silent in the parlor, gathering dust. I recalled no day of my childhood that had gone without the grace of a melody from that old thing. It had been Mother's passion for as long as I could remember -- the one thing I identified with her above anything else. And it was the most conspicuously absent detail in Lassr.

He seemed to actively shun it.

I noted, each day, the dust that accumulated on its keys. After three weeks of seeing it there, lonely and abandoned, I decided that I could no longer quietly accept what fate had dealt me. I took to doing what Lassr would not, every day dusting and polishing the instrument of Mother's joy, meticulously tuning it as she did -- always by hand, with the old tuning kit she kept in the seat. She would never have allowed a machine to do the work she loved.

I took to watching Lassr with a new interest, noting every move and every mannerism, analyzing every little habit. Every day crystallized my certainty of Mother's absence all the more, and every day my hatred of him compounded. I began to think about ways to expose his treachery -- to let the world see what I knew. It seemed impossible that his charm had blinded them so.

He came to me in the parlor one day, startling me during a tuning. I hit my head on the case lid. Lassr winced.

"Oh, honey...be careful. You'll give yourself a goose-egg!" He put his hand out to touch me, and our halos brushed briefly as I pulled away. It approximated Mother's characteristic hyperactive tingle, but it felt counterfeit; almost mocking in its farce.

He read my glare, shook his head and smiled thinly as he looked away. "I wish you could come to terms with this," he said. "It's me, Savr. It's always been me! I don't understand this aversion."

"Sorry, Lassr," I said. "Just having trouble adjusting."

"But nothing's changed!" The exasperation in his tone was the only thing that kept his statement from sounding like a joke. You only had to look at him to see how much things had changed.

I circled the piano, blocking my view of him with its raised top as I idly pushed a rag over its surfaces. I wished he'd go away...but instead I heard him drag the seat out, carelessly grinding its legs on the floor. I felt the click of the fallboard and the initial tap of his fingertips against the keys like gunshots through my temples. And I listened while he played. I barely breathed as those thick, rich chords bubbled off the soundboard. It sang dark and moody, like the rumbling premonition of a storm. He played with Mother's skill...but with none of the bright, lilting tones I had known her by.

He finished with an abrupt break into an almost comical phrase, rolling the melody up into a cadenza that stopped, abruptly, at A6. I peered at him as he tapped the dull note a few more times in confusion.

"Huh," he grunted. "String must be broken." He stood up and grinned at me. "Really, Savr," he said, "we should at least try to get along. I could be your sibling, you know...if not your parent. I hope you can find some way to accept me."

He walked away, leaving me seething, contemplating that wicked, soulless grin and the cold coil of piano string my fingers found in my pocket.

The prospect of killing him grew more attractive with each passing day. It seemed the surest way of rescuing Mother. Mindstate backups were rare within the first few months of a new union. It was better to wait until the composite personality stabilized. So any reinstatement would have to fall back to the original, separate incarnations: Mother and Jek.

I planned meticulously, sought the resources to affect my vengeance with tireless resolve. I didn't care much what happened after he was dead; I cared only that he'd get what he had coming to him. Even if the rest of the world could blind itself to the necessity of justice, I could find my own peace knowing justice had been done. Whatever came afterward would be little more than a footnote in my life.

I gathered my equipment and watched the days creep by. I watched Lassr and Anya rape my mother's estate beneath the cover of her participation. They threw parties every week, entertained to a lesser extent every night, and always went to bed exhausted and inebriated. They did everything my mother would never have dreamt of doing.

One night I decided I had suffered their malfeasance enough. I disabled my halo's interface on the household infonet, cut its anchors out of my skin with the felt razor from Mother's tuning kit, and compiled the products of my undercover preparation in a satchel on my back with a dead man's switch wired to its harness. Simply shrugging it off my shoulder would set things in motion.

I went to their room and knocked on the door. Lassr's thick voice answered: "Who?"

"Mom," I said, "it's me. I wanted to say ... I'm sorry."

"It's open."

I turned the knob, stepped through...and dropped the bag. I could almost feel the pulse of the EMP discharging as it hit the floor, sizzling through the anchors of my severed halo, jittering up my vision and turning the world into a bubbling sea of black soot. I scratched the dead clumps of vision foglets out of my eyes and, for the first time, saw my world for what it truly was: A hollow space draped in brittle, clinging veils of soot-like nanomachines, clumping and crawling over each other, maimed by my EMP out of their synergistic imitations of the familiar things that made up our daily lives. Without the interfaces to the house dictating the character of its reality to my senses, it was clear enough to distinguish what was real. There were no doors, no walls -- just the skeletal tangle of support beams, power conduits and plumbing. Through the sloughing curtain of broken-down utility fog that had been my Mother's bedroom wall, I could see her piano in the parlor, its white finish powdered with ruined black.

I pulled the piano wire out of my pocket and leapt toward where the bed had been. I heard them screaming and spluttering at the bottom of that ashen bulk, deposited where the crumpling of nanomachine chains had ended on the floor. I dug through the ash like digging through snow, kicking it out behind me until I found Lassr's hair. I grabbed it and hauled him up, and with one deft flick of my arm I wrapped the wire around his throat.

It bit into my hands as I pulled. I winced against the pain, chewing my tongue. Somewhere in the heap, Anya struggled. The hooks of her dead halo in her skin dragged her down and made her flailing useless. Everywhere she moved, she hauled loads of inert foglets along with her.

I pulled; Lassr spluttered. I felt warm blood running over my fingers -- blood from my hands and blood from his throat as the wire sliced through soft flesh, into muscle and into vein. Lights began to flash in my vision. I'd figured it wouldn't take the authorities long to interdict. But as I worked the wire like a saw across Lassr's throat, feeling the life ebb out of him even while he struggled in my arms, I knew they wouldn't arrive till it was too late.

"I love you, Mother," I whispered into Lassr's ear.

He thrashed and fell limp. I let the wire go and watched him slump away, swallowed into the swirling drifts of an ebony snow.

He came to see me later in my holding cell. His smile was the same, thin and cocky.

"I wanted you to know...I still love you," he said. He stood there, a tantalizing prize behind an invisible wall of foglets. "I'm sure you'll be able to accept that, once they find and excise whatever diseased meme drove you to do such a horrible thing. You really are lucky, Savr. You know, a long time ago, they used to execute people for murder. Imagine that! Killing someone for killing someone. What a quaint little notion of justice!"

"I hate you," I said. "They can make me love you tomorrow...but I hate you now."

Lassr shook his head. "I wish I understood what brought you to this," he said. "I wish...it could have been better."

He turned to leave, but hesitated. He glanced back at me over his shoulder. "I really don't think I'll ever be able to trust you again, Savr," he said. "I'll always be your mother...but I doubt I'll ever be able to think of you the same way again. You could have really hurt someone."

He smiled.

"I suppose I'm just lucky I kept a backup...even if it is a little incomplete."