Granny Mnemonic

The last straw for Mamma Luscious came when the new locks the Super installed crashed her meta-cortex. As she reached for the building's front doorknob, the lock's query to her password cache caused a buffer overflow, and she bluescreened right there on the building's front porch. She had enough time to think Oh shit! before everything went black.

Some indeterminate time later, the world came back in a burst of light and sound. Her whole body tingled with pins and needles. There was a moment of lunatic calm when she heard nothing in her head, then her dozen idiot-savant implants all screamed at once.

It took Mamma a moment to get everyone calmed down, and another for her heart to quit hammering in her chest. How long have I been out? She checked her internal clock, but it was down--"12:00:00.0" flashing over and over in the corner of her vision. She looked around; the sun was still up. An hour? Less, maybe?

"Jeff! Jeff!" she yelled up at the Super's window. In front of the crumbling brownstone sat a large, concrete planter. She hobbled off the porch and scooped up a handful of pebbles, then arced one up at Jeff's window. It made a metallic clink! against the armorglass. She waited a moment, and tried again. And again. On the fourth stone, the window flew up.

"What?!" Jeff shouted. He looked down. "Oh, Mamma Luscious. What can I do for you?"

"You can let me into my own goddamn building!" she yelled. "The door crashed me when I tried to open it and Lord knows how long I've been frozen out here on the porch."

"Sorry, Mamma," he said, dropping the gruff tone. "The insurance company said they'd give us a break on our policy if we upgraded the locks. I didn't realize that they would be too much for your implants."

Mamma snorted and scratched the occipital processor bulge that lay under her gray dreadlocks. They're old, like me. "So, you going to let me in or not?"

"I'll buzz you in," Jeff said. "Come up and I'll burn you a chipcard to use until we get this sorted out." He gophered back into the apartment.

Mamma hobbled back up the porch stairs--new-grown knees were too expensive for her--and pushed the door when it buzzed.

Jeff was in the hall, waiting, by the time she made it to the second floor. "Come on in."

She shuffled into his kitchen. "I'll be right back," he said and brushed past her. "Just got to get the card burner."

Jeff came back a minute later from the other room with a black polyresin cube in one hand and a wireless keyboard in the other. A green LED winked on as he set them on the table.

"OK, we're ready," he said as he ceremoniously tapped a couple of commands on the keyboard. "I just need you to tell me your personal data, so that..."

Mamma Luscious held out her right hand. The LED on top of the burner flickered as the infrared port in her palm transmitted her ID file. "There you go."

Jeff blinked. "Ah...OK." He pressed a key, then handed her the gray plastic slab the burner spat out. "There you go. It'll take care of both the main door and your apartment. Just wave it in front of the lock plate, and the door'll open right up."

Out in the hall, Mamma examined the chipcard. The technology was old--older even than she was--but was still useful. Unlike my implants, she thought.

When she was just a young thing, Mamma and her clique of implant-studded friends had awaited the coming of St. Vernor and his Post-human Angels in the white-hot blaze of the Singularity. They were all sure that when it came, they'd drink twenty-four seven from the fire-hose of data--jetting Promethean fires of invention from every pore down onto the benighted Unmodified below. They would be young and hip and rich forever. The world would dance to their tune, and be better for it.

Meta-memory tags of those early days rose unbidden in her vision. Mamma batted them away, tucked the card in her pocket, and started towards her apartment. "I gotta do something about my implants," she muttered. "I'm way too old for this shit."

The next morning, Mamma lit a cigarette and dropped into the chair beside the kitchen table. How am I going get an upgrade? she thought. Nobody even makes implants anymore. Maybe somebody could kludge together a software patch for her. But even a low-level fix like that would be expensive. Expense wouldn't have been a problem a few years ago--back before the AI that ran her Micronesian trust had fallen for a Bhutanese Government bond scam, and she'd lost everything.

Since then, she'd just barely paid the bills as an antique scout, trolling the flea-markets and selling her finds to a trendy little boutique downtown. No way she could afford bespoke software with the money she made now.

"Guess I'll have to find a job." She took a drag on her cigarette.

"Benson," she said, and a series of meta-memory tags exploded in her vision. She waved them away, all except the one that had his last known address and contact number.

"Try giving him a call," she said, and got up to put the kettle on. Tinker Bell, the commo implant embedded behind her left ear, dialed the number.

On the third ring, someone picked up. "Hello?"

"Yeah, is Benson there?"

"You got the wrong number. Never heard of him."

Mamma Luscious raced through her memory tags for his shell-company's name. "Wait! Is this the Baltimore branch of Applied Thermodynamic Products?"

"It is," the voice said, after a pause.

"Then could I talk to Benson, please?"

A six-inch-high Napoleon Bonaparte, her personal firewall's avatar, appeared on the countertop and began yammering. "Mon Dieu! We are probed! Brain hack! Avant mes beaux sabreurs!"

"Can it, Nappy," she sub-vocalized. Her firewall went silent, but the miniature Corsican continued to stalk about the counter, gesticulating like a bad actor.

"Benson, that you?" she asked. "It's me, Mamma Luscious."

"Who?"

"You know me. Quit trying to fish my head."

"Sorry. Been a while. A long while. What can I do for you, hon?"

"Benson, I need to make some money."

The pause this time seemed to stretch forever. "Mamma, you know you can always come to me if you need a little bit of cash."

"I don't need a handout, Benson, I need a job," Mamma Luscious replied. "I gotta upgrade my..." She bit her tongue. Not smart to remind him of how old I am. She'd been the best--and oldest--digital signature forger in Benson's stable of talent a decade ago. "Money's a little tight, is all, and I was wondering if you have any openings. I still got my old magic."

"Uh-huh," Benson said. "So how are you at the new DSP 2.44 standard sig files?"

She lied. "Uh, no problem. Why?"

"Because they don't exist, hon. You'd know that if you were current."

She fought to keep her growing sense of desperation out of her voice. "Then maybe there's something else I could do for you."

"Like what?"

She shrugged. "I dunno. Stuff. Whatever you need."

"Mamma, you know I'd like to help you out, but..."

She sighed. "But you can't."

"No," Benson said. "Sorry."

Mamma Luscious hung her head. "OK, then."

"Bye, Mamma."

"Goodbye, Benson."

The line went dead. She spooned tea powder and sugar into an empty mug, then drowned them with hot water from the stove.

"Nappy," she asked. "are we all right?"

"Oui," her firewall replied. The avatar drew his sword and thrust it forward. "Zey charged ze guns, mon Josephine, but fell back empty-handed. You were not hacked."

Mamma drank her tea in three swallows, then checked her watch. Time to see what the flea-market gods would bring her today.

The subway spit her out a block from the Bazaar. The smell hit her as she came up the steps to street level--the tang of setting thermoplastics, roast meat, shit, and spices. Mamma stopped and bought herself a can of Korean ginseng drink at a stall, then started for the back. That's generally where the Crone laid out her stuff.

Out of habit, she scanned the junk laying on the sagging folding tables and faded, dusty blankets as she walked; just in case there was a treasure among the dross. But there wasn't.

Crone was in her usual place, beside the wall of an abandoned building. A hundred if she was a day, the old woman sat, wrapped in a red and white-print sari that had long ago faded into cryptic blobs of color, surrounded by three grimy blankets that held her wares.

"Hey old lady, how you doing?" Mamma said.

The Crone smiled. While she seemed to understand English, the woman never spoke. Mamma Luscious examined the neat rows of the latest portable hardware--quantum overclockers, memory caches, data fans--laid out with surgical precision on the blankets.

"Any antiques today?"

The Crone lifted a blanket beside her and pulled out a large, black, nylon bag with a busted zipper, then set it between them.

"Great," Mamma said. She pulled the edges of the bag open and started digging. It was full of junk--orphan cables and odd-size batteries, a handful of plastic Japanimation tie-in action figures, an empty, label-less whiskey bottle.

But in the bottom, she struck gold. Mamma discovered four flat, square plastic boxes, each the size of her hand, covered with illustrated stickers. The names printed on the top of the labels meant nothing to her, but she'd seen these cases before--pre-digital things called 8-track tapes. If they still worked, she'd net enough from Ted downtown to pay her rent this month.

She set the 8-tracks on top of the stack of cables, acting as if she wasn't interested, and continued rooting.

The only other item in the bag was a cube-shaped device ten centimeters on a side, with an IR port and a half-moon window on top, and inside, a platter of silvered plastic. She found the make and model number on the side of the cube, then ran a quick net search in her head. Early semi-optical storage called a CD burner. The circle thing inside was a CD itself.

Mamma's heart beat a little faster. If it worked, the cube was worth at least ten times what she'd get for the tapes. But not enough for a software patch, she thought, and felt a pang of disappointment.

Still, something was better than nothing. Mamma turned the CD cube over in her hand and examined the socket where the power cord went. She glanced at the tangled cords laying on the blanket. That one, she thought as her pattern-matching program found one that would fit the hole in the side of the cube. She slid the cube back into the nylon bag, then piled the 8-track tapes and all the rest of the junk on top.

"How much for everything?" she asked with a smile, holding the bag up as if she was barely interested.

The Crone's eyebrows knitted momentarily before she reached for a small, battered, gray plastic calculator. The old woman pressed a series of buttons and handed the calculator to Mamma.

The number was twice what she'd hoped to pay. Mamma shook her head and punched in a new set of numbers.

The Crone chewed her lip. The number that came back was high, but almost within the range Mamma was willing to pay.

She tried again, upping her last offer by twenty per cent. The Crone paused and made a face like she'd been cheated out of her one and only sari. Finally, she nodded.

Mamma stood and counted out the right number of bills. She passed them to the Crone, who re-counted them and smiled at her.

Mamma bent down and picked up the nylon bag. "Good doing business with you. See you next week." The Crone waved. Mamma turned and started back towards the street.

She was getting dressed the next morning when Tinker Bell nudged her with a soft chime. "Hello?" Mamma said, tugging a finger-wide belt through her pant-loops.

"Mamma, you know who this is."

Tinker Bell matched the voice to a list of recent calls. Benson. Napoleon appeared, scowling from the top of the dresser.

"Yeah. What do you want?"

"I have a job, if you're still interested."

After their last conversation, she hadn't expected to hear from him again.

"Mamma, you there? You still remember my favorite restaurant?"

She snatched at a meta-memory tag. "Yeah."

"Good. Meet you there in an hour." The connection dropped.

"I do not trust zees man, mon Josephine," Napoleon pouted.

"You're being paranoid. Benson's all right," she sub-vocalized. "But if it'll make you happy, why don't you stay active 'till after the meeting?"

Napoleon nodded and shrank to a scowling portrait that hung in the lower-left of her vision.

She hopped off the bus on the other side of town with ten minutes to spare. "Nappy, you remember how we used to do a security check before meetings?"

"Oui."

"Check the public feeds. Anybody cameras taking an interest in us?"

"Non, mon Josephine, no-ting out of order."

"Good." She found a doorway down and across from the restaurant--a 1950's-revival place, all chrome and glass--and got comfortable.

A minute later, Benson appeared around down the street. Still wearing that damned, old drover's coat, she thought.

Mamma watched him go into the restaurant, then counted ten.

"Nappy, any cameras panned in our direction?"

"Non."

She crossed the street as quickly as she could. The restaurant's door grated open.

Benson sat at the rear of the place, sandwiched between the lunch counter and the wall. She pulled and age-progressed her last image of him just to be sure.

"'Lo, Mamma," he said as she came up. "Been a while." He held out his hand. The platinum bracelet on his arm tinked against the button of his linen cuff.

Mamma gave his hand a brief squeeze. "You're looking good, Benson," she said.

"You want some coffee? I'm buying."

Benson waved for the waitress.

"So what do you have for me?" Mamma asked Mamma, blowing on her coffee after the waitress left.

Benson glanced at her sideways. "You know better than to ask that. We'll go for a walk after we finish."

"We moved, you know," Benson continued. "Up away from the Inner Harbor."

"Really? Glad to hear it."

"You ready?" Benson asked a few minutes later, setting his cup down. Mamma nodded.

Benson produced a roll of bills from his pocket, and peeled one off. He slid it across the counter at the waitress. "Thanks."

The woman's eyes widened. "Thank you."

She followed Benson out of the diner and down the street. The sun played tag with the clouds as they passed into a re-urb neighborhood of trendy, hip, young things--all brocade and Renaissance sleeves--hanging out at a string of street-side cafes. Mamma shook her head as she passed by.

"That was me once," she said to Benson. "Just too damn cool for my own good."

A few blocks on, they stopped before a nondescript, but well maintained, row-house. Benson climbed the porch and dug in his pocket. He waved a chipcard in front of the lock. "C'mon in," he said, holding the door for her.

Mamma brushed past into the hallway. Or rather, where the hallway should be. She looked around, then up. Except for a loft in the back, the first two floors had been converted into a single open space. Chinese scrolls and brocade-backed Tibetan God paintings lined the walls.

"Welcome to Paradise Galleries," Benson said.

She heard footsteps on metal and noticed the iron staircase in the far corner. A twenty-something in a silver brocade doublet and faux-Norman haircut clunked down towards them.

"Jesus! You've grown up," Mamma said.

Junior, Benson's son, gave her a hug, then stepped back. "Mamma Luscious! It's been a long time." He turned towards Benson. "Dad, I'm going out for a while. Be back after dinner."

"Stick around for a minute," Benson said. "Mamma and I are doing a deal." He turned back to her. "It's like pulling teeth with this kid. I'm trying to teach him the business, but he isn't interested. Now about this job. You remember what Murasaki used to do for me?"

"Oh, Jesus Christ!" she spat after a moment's thought. "You're kidding, right? I'm no datastash. That's pure script-kiddie stuff. No money in it."

"There's money in this one," Benson said. "It's for Cesar Montoya."

Mamma ran a quick name search, then dumped the results into her short-term memory. "Holy shit."

Benson nodded. "The Feds just rolled him up. They're already slapping search-and-lock warrants on anything connected to him."

"No. No way," Mamma said Mamma, shaking her head. "That zombie-spam king can burn in hell. One of his autonomous ads tried to crawl into my meta-cortex a while back. Made me sick for a week."

Benson shrugged. "Your decision. But your cut would be three quarters of a mil on return of the file back to me."

Mamma blinked. "Come again?"

"Three quarters of a mil, stable-value cash equivalent, in any account you designate."

Mamma bit her lip. That was enough to retire. Or hire a programmer. Hell, that was enough to hire a programmer, and retire. "How long would I have to hold it?"

Benson shrugged. "Week or two--until he makes bail."

"Why me?" Mamma asked.

"You're an old friend, and I thought..."

"Why me?" she repeated.

Benson sighed. "Because your chipset is obsolete."

"What?!"

Benson shifted uneasily from foot to foot. "Your chipset is obsolete. It crashed the hack I ran on you when you called the other day." He pointed to her head. "I'm amazed you're able to run anything at all besides old vid clips on that stuff."

Mamma scowled. "You gotta be kidding me..."

Benson shrugged. "Look at it this way. You're so far behind, you're friggin' invulnerable. Which is why I asked you to do the job. You want it or not?"

Mamma hesitated, suddenly worried she might be too old to get back in the game. What if I get busted? she thought. Straight to prison. But without a software upgrade, her life was already a prison--her implants forever falling further and further behind. She sighed. "OK, I'm in. When do I start?"

"Right now," Benson replied. "Let's get you uploaded." He looked over at Junior. "You need to come, too."

Mamma and Junior followed Benson up the circular staircase to the loft, and into a small, curtain-shielded office. Two small desks held rows of brick-sized mainframes, all linked to a single screen and holofield keyboard. Junior slouched onto the edge of the far desk and looked bored. Benson sat and pulled the keyboard closer. "Have a seat," he said.

Mamma dropped into a chair beside him.

"You still got that subdermal IR port?" he asked.

Mamma nodded and held out her hand, palm up. "Where do you want it?"

Benson pointed at the keyboard. "Right there. Give me a second." Red lines danced over his fingers as the typed inside the holofield. "OK. I'm ready when you are."

Mamma slid her hand into the holofield, and a packet of data plopped into her download buffer--a small, encrypted, icon-locked file that glittered blue-white like a diamond in the darkness of her mind. "Is that it?"

Benson nodded. "That's it."

Mamma stood up and held out her hand. "You'll let me know when you want it back?"

Benson nodded. "Call me in two weeks if you don't hear back from me."

The probe came about five days after the download, and was so subtle she almost missed it. Mamma sat up in bed and rubbed her bleary eyes. As her hands moved back for another rub, Napoleon appeared on the bedspread.

"Mon Josephine! Ze scouts report cavalry in ze trees! Lend me your eyes for reconnaissance."

Mamma relinquished voluntary motor control, and her eyes shifted to the Beijing travel poster on the far wall. There was rustling in her mind as Napoleon found a memory of the poster, then matched the two images. Bit-rot in her vision showed that someone was dicking with her processors.

"Wellington is trying to slip into ze encampment tru ze visual processors," Napoleon said.

Mamma retook control and got out of bed. Her vision got worse--grainy, the color balance skewed to green.

"Napoleon? What's going on?" she asked.

"Zair cavalry made a small charge, but ze line held."

Mamma froze. If someone was trying to hack her, they must have already gotten to Benson. And they could already be on their way here.

Panicked by the thought, she threw on last night's clothes. Her vision stabilized, the interference dropping, as she tied her shoes.

Thank God for small favors. Mamma stuffed her wallet into her pocket, then went to the living room for her coat.

On the table lay the CD burner she'd bought last week. She'd wanted to clean it up before she sold it. Looking at it, she had an idea.

Keeping the idea in her head and out of reach of her implants took intense concentration, like trying to hold a hand motionless at arm's length.

"Athena," she hissed through clenched teeth.

Something rose from deep inside her mind, like a rippling sea-serpent. Then a woman's voice whispered, "I'm here."

Napoleon reappeared, his face livid. "Mon Josephine! What have you done? We are at war! Make this Diable go away!"

"Can it, Nappy," she said out loud. "I need her. Matter of fact, I need you to disconnect me from the net entirely and put everybody--including yourself--in sleep mode for at least ten minutes, while Athena and I take care of some business."

Napoleon pouted. Her hacking implant and Nappy had always conflicted.

"I mean now, Napoleon," Mamma hissed, still concentrating.

When it came, the silence of her mind--sans implants--hit her like a gut-punch. She leaned against the table to steady herself. "Jesus..." It felt worse than when she'd crashed on the porch.

Mamma examined the CD Burner. Hope the IR port still works, she thought. She opened the cover and examined the disk inside, querying an image matching subroutine, before remembering that all but one of her implants were off. Hopefully, the CD had enough blank space left on it. Mamma replaced the disk, plugged it in, then thumbed the power button on the side of the cube. A green light winked on.

"Athena," she said out loud, "Look in my download buffer. See that diamond-shaped file?"

"I do," the implant whispered. "However, the encryption is too strong for me to..."

"I don't want you to crack it," Mamma said. "I want you to read it out to my IR port, a byte at a time. Then delete it."

Mamma felt a wave of confusion from her long-disused implant. "Why me? Tinker Bell could taken care of this."

"Because, Athena, you're the only one without a storage buffer. I don't want to take the chance of leaving another copy of the file around in my head for someone to find."

Mamma reached down and put her palm over the burner's IR port. "OK, Athena, give it to me."

"Mamma, you look like hell," Benson said as she slid onto the stool at his favorite restaurant. His drover coat hung over his shoulders like a cape, his right arm held to his chest with a green cloth sling.

"Coffee," she said when the waitress appeared. Mamma set a black, nylon bag on the floor beside her. "You don't look so good yourself."

Benson shrugged and pulled back the fabric to show the regeneration pod clamped over the end of his arm. "The Feds said I was going for a weapon. It's just a hand. It'll grow back."

"Is Junior all right?" she asked.

"He will be," replied Benson. "But I'll be damned if he ever works in my line of business again. He puked your name up at the first sign of blood."

Mamma grunted. "That's too bad. He's young, though. Plenty of opportunities." The waitress brought her coffee.

"Where've you been?" Benson asked after a pause. "I've been trying to call you for days."

"With a friend," Mamma replied, thanking whatever God the Crone believed in.

"Montoya beat the rap last week. He wants his file." Benson reached into his drover coat and removed a palm-sized, black polyresin box. On top was an IR port. Benson slid it along the counter towards her. "Just dump the file in here."

Mamma sucked her teeth. "I'd love to, but I can't."

"What do you mean, you can't?" Benson sputtered. His eyes narrowed. "Don't tell me the Feds got inside your head and took the file."

She shook a sip of coffee. "Nope. I went offline after their first try. Been that way ever since."

"You dumped the file!" Benson said, his voice rising. "Jesus! I can't believe you did something like that! We're so screwed. That was Montoya's bank account info. We'll be lucky if he just kills us first without..."

"Calm down, Benson. I've still got the file." She set the bag on the counter. "It's just not in my head anymore." Mamma pulled the burner from the bag and set it in front of her, then retrieved the disk from her jacket pocket. "It's on this."

Benson's mouth snapped shut in mid-rant. After a moment, a grin spread over his face. "Is that what I think it is?"

She nodded. "Yep. You said I was so old, my implants were hackproof. So I figured this," she patted the CD burner, "being older, was even more hackproof."

She put the burner back in the bag, then handed it to him. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a bazaar to go to." She stood up.

"Wait. Where do you want me to deposit your payment?" Benson asked.

Mamma turned to face him. "Actually, I'm beginning to think that sometimes the old way is the best way, after all. Give it to me in cash."