What I saw caused me to drop the phone in shock, it slipping through my limp-with-shock fingers and tumbling onto the floor with a clatter.
Dad was death on cell phones, even flip phones, so I had never had one, but I was pretty sure what I saw was called the lock screen. You could select a picture that would be displayed while the phone was locked.
So, why, then, was a picture of me and my mom the lock screen photo of this phone that presumably belonged to gun runners?!
Everyone said that powers were bullcrap and you shouldn't try to understand them with normal logic, but there was a point when things got too crazy to explain away with that simple platitude.
I reached down and grabbed the phone from the floor, the screen lighting up again. I didn't recognise this photo of my mom or me, and I was confident it was never taken. They were on the roof of a building, and the background was a cityscape that would look more in place in Tokyo than in Brockton Bay. I was absolutely sure I had never been there!
I tried to move the photo around with my thumb, but as soon as I touched the screen, a green padlock icon appeared along with the text, " BIOMETRIC MATCH. " Then the phone unlocked, and I was looking at a totally unfamiliar screen full of odd icons and glyphs.
Wait... what?! Did this phone just unlock to my fingerprint?! I did a lot of research on fingerprints back when I still thought the teachers and school officials would still do anything about the Trio. How stupid I was back then. How could this phone unlock to my fingerprint? Maybe any fingerprint unlocked it? That didn't seem to sit right with the words biometric match, though. This was starting to get weirder and weirder, and I was half-expecting some kind of SAW situation from that disgusting Earth Aleph horror movie.
I looked at the unfamiliar glyphs on the screen, but there was one that looked like an old-time telephone, so I pressed it. For the moment, I was ignoring the fact that the Home Screen picture was my dad and me with my dad wearing some kind of military uniform. I find the dialer and enter 9-1-1 and CALL, putting the phone up to my head.
The phone answers immediately, and the voice is slick but slightly computer generated, "Night City Emergency Services, Miss Taylor Hebert, I see your location as the twenty-ninth floor of Megabuilding H8 in Westbrook. Please be advised present response times to your position exceed O NE ONE ZERO minutes. Do you wish to continue?"
What?
I stammer out, "No, thank you," and get another computer-generated response, "Very well, you have been charged ten eurodollars for this service. Have a good day."
I glance at the phone's screen in shock, in time to see a red alert at the top of the screen indicating that ten eurodollars, whatever those are, have been deducted from my account. I have been thinking about this for a while, but I need to say it out loud, "Toto, I don't think I am in Kansas anymore."
I stare at the picture on the home screen, perplexed. Dad looks pretty good in a military uniform, but I can't even determine which military he is in. I set the phone down and do some breathing exercises that the information in the back of my head is telling me will be helpful for stress, as I have been hyperventilating for over fifteen minutes, and my hands were starting to cramp into useless claws.
My... what is this, even? A medical-based Thinker power? But I diagnosed myself immediately with a carpopedal spasm caused by hyperventilation due to localised hypocalcemia. Treatment was getting my breathing under conscious control, so I started breathing in a slow pattern that was clinically proven to provide anxiolytic benefits.
After a few minutes of just sitting there and relaxing, I grab the phone again, and this time I try unlocking it with my left pinky finger, only to get a stern red icon. Sighing, I use my right thumb, and it unlocks. I was very good with computers, and ultimately this was just an unfamiliar computer interface. But it was one that was clearly designed for ease of use, as the icons made sense and were straightforward.
I navigate through a number of pending notifications and find what seems to be the text messaging app, seeing a lot of texts to this phone that was more or less similar in nature, in that they were all offering condolences or saying that they would miss... me? They were clearly texting a Taylor Hebert.
There was a different app for e-mails, and there were a couple of pending notifications in that app too, which I pulled up. The first e-mail answered a lot of questions but gave me a lot more besides.
FROM: Alice Newman Militech HR
TO: Taylor Hebert Dependents, Militech Intranet
DATE: Saturday, August 5, 2062
SUBJECT: Dependent Settlement
Dear Miss Hebert,
First, let me offer our condolences for the recent loss of your father, MAJOR DANIEL HEBERT, who was killed in the line of duty at [REDACTED] on [REDACTED]. All of Militech owes you a great debt.
However, while Major Hebert was eligible for the Enhanced Combat Survivor's Benefit, it has been determined that the [REDACTED] at [REDACTED] is to be considered a POLICE ACTION, and while Major Hebert was killed in the line of duty, deaths resultant from POLICE ACTIONS are not considered combat deaths, so you are eligible for only the basic survivorship package.
While we understand this isn't the decision you may have hoped for, we hope you understand that only through careful stewardship of the finances entrusted to us can we remain a strong Militech family.
Additionally, as you are the only next of kin and are a minor child, there are some important decisions you must make before SEPTEMBER 1, 2062 ; otherwise, we are legally obligated to forward your file to the Night City government for foster placement. I am not qualified to advise you on this matter. However, attached to this e-mail is a small 472-page guide about your options. It is recommended that you retain an attorney...
...
...
There were about three more pages of finely worded legalese, but I started hyperventilating again when I read foster placement. I wasn't even from this universe; of that, I was absolutely certain now. Could they really put me in foster care? Oh, and my universe-dad was dead, I guess. Honestly, that wasn't that different from what I was used to. My actual dad was basically just walking dead already, merely acting out the memories of what life once was like a revenant.
That made me think about him. Practically the only emotion he actually felt was worry, and he was going to be out of his mind with it, worried that I never came home from school, and I was worried that I might never see him again. Travel between universes was difficult enough between Aleph and Bet, and it was illegal, in fact, except in highly supervised cases.
But this... this was something very different. There weren't alternate versions of you in Earth Aleph. That wasn't how this worked! I had read about the theorised point of divergence between the two universes, and the accumulated differences over time were enough butterflies to ensure that there was no, for example, Taylor Hebert on Earth Aleph. And there certainly was no Taylor Hebert in 2062.
This wasn't Earth Gimel; this was something very different.
This meant that I probably would never see my dad again and that he would have to deal with a missing daughter on top of losing his wife just a couple of years ago. Oh god, he was barely hanging on as it was!
Unless... hopefully, I just swapped places with this Alternate Taylor? If so, I want to apologise if you find yourself inside a disgusting locker. Although, since it sent me to about five feet above the ground, it probably wasn't going to be one hundred per cent accurate when swapping Alt-Taylor? Hopefully, she'd fall in front of the locker.
Maybe that... would be for the best? Judging from all the text messages, this girl had she had friends, people who seemed to care enough about her to at least offer words of platitude, even if they were only being polite. Her contact list was full of names, and she had been texting to and from people her own age. Some even said that they would miss her since apparently she couldn't stay enrolled at the Militech school after her father passed away. By any metric, I could see she was vastly superior in all respects to me.
I didn't want to inflict my life on my worst enemy, except maybe Sophia, and especially not on an alternate version of myself from a different universe, but surely this Alt-Taylor was smart enough that she could figure out how to get out of my predicament that I had been suffering through since I entered high school. She was, from all appearances, smart both intellectually and socially, unlike me.
The part of my brain full of psychiatry information was warning me that I was approaching seriously unhealthy levels of self-loathing, ' I wish that would just shut up! I'm not asking for advice!'
I stewed there on the couch, which I could see was a fold-out bed as well and built into the side of the wall and tried to use the phone to find out anything I could about where I was.
On the plus side, all these cardboard boxes didn't have guns or grenades in them. Well, most of them didn't. I found several pistols in boxes with the rest of Alt-Dad's effects. I carefully set them aside, not knowing the first thing about either safely handling them or even making sure that they were safe, so I figured the safest thing to do was just not to touch them at all.
The boxes were full of all the stuff Alt-Taylor and Alt-Dad had in their apartment. Apparently, the company evicted you pretty rapidly in the event you left their service, even if it was in case of death. However, they packed everything well, and according to that lady's e-mail, part of the "basic survivorship package" included three months of paid rent at accommodations of their choice that were rated at least GREEN for safety, whatever that meant.
I had figured out how to turn on the television that was integrated into one of the walls, but after it started playing " America's Most Violent Home Videos" and seeing some gang member accidentally blow himself up with a grenade to a laugh track , I turned it off immediately. I thought life was cheap in Brockton Bay, but this goes far beyond what I'm used to. Although, that sort of thing might have been played on Über and Leet's private channel, and it wasn't actually that far off from what I would expect one of the Merchant's to do.
However, at least I managed to find the boxes that contained Alt-Taylor's clothes, so I put on some of her pyjamas so I wouldn't be stuck in a towel for the foreseeable future.
After making sure that the door outside was well and truly locked, I decided the best thing I could do was just cry myself to sleep on the roll-out futon.
My dreams seemed to last years; I dreamt of Alt-Taylor's life. It wasn't as though I relived her entire life, not even close. Nor did I have her full memories at my beck and call when I woke up, but when I woke up, I was a lot less confused about my location and situation.
Alt-Taylor had been expecting the company to screw her over in more or less the manner that they ended up doing. Even if she didn't precisely know how they would fuck her, she knew it was coming. However, instead of my own impression that everyone was out to screw me over, Alt-Taylor's impression was that the corp screwed everyone. The nuance was totally different, there was no personal animus behind it, and Alt-Taylor didn't even seem that upset about it. Alt-Taylor and her dad had even made contingency planning for this exact scenario, as he was apparently under no illusions about how dangerous his job was.
I was more sure that we had swapped places now because the impressions I got from my dreams were of two boats passing in the night, going to opposite places. Or two streams of energy passing through each other as we coiled around a massively giant crystalline entity, which was why I had gotten a few of her memories.
I held my hands up in prayer, devotedly apologising for inflicting my life on the much more well-adjusted girl. Was this a punishment for me? Because I had not managed to help my Dad that I was being tossed into a universe where I had already lost him?
No, that didn't make sense.
I blinked. Normally, I would not have contradicted my self-denigrations like that. I glanced over at the tub of anti-depressant powder that was still on the kitchenette sink. Well, they were supposed to work very fast.
The thing about normalising my neurotransmitters was it wasn't a cure for anything, really. However, if your brain chemistry was so out of wack, your sense of depression and self-loathing would tend to make you avoid or sabotage any kind of treatment, my medical sense told me.
I still had all the same predilections; however, at least my brain wasn't firmly reinforcing my self-loathing anymore. The fact that I could make such a self-diagnosis without angrily denying it seemed to be proof of their effectiveness.
Sighing, I walked over to the couch again. I had all the contingency files on Alt-Taylor's phone. Alt-Dad had set up a complicated flowchart that he assured would give me the maximum out of the Corp.
Glancing at the pistol on the coffee table, I grabbed it, thumbed the magazine release and pulled the pistol's slide out of battery slightly to check to make sure there was no round in the chamber. There wasn't. I sat the empty gun and full magazine back down on the coffee table. While I didn't get anywhere near all of Alt-Taylor's memories, there were a surprising number of memories of Alt-Dad teaching his daughter about firearms and firearms safety.
Well, I suppose that could be useful, even if my first impression of guns was still of deep antipathy. Dad kept a shotgun at home, but Mom was always against anyone having guns, which was a lot different than Alt-Taylor's mom, who also worked for Militech. I suppose it was hard to be Pro Gun Control laws when you lived in a world where the government hardly exists and you work for an arms company.
Sighing, I brought up the private files on Alt-Taylor... no, it's my phone now. It wasn't good to keep such things compartmentalised mentally. Perhaps I could find a way back to my own universe in the future, but if I keep acting mentally like Alt-Taylor and I were two different girls, then I may slip up when interacting with people from this universe. That would lead to either mental institutionalisation or vivisection, depending on if they believed that I was actually from another universe or not. Alt-Taylor had no illusions at all about what those truly in power would do if they thought I might lead them to new, unknown Earths. Complete destructive testing of every molecule in my body if I was lucky.
