[1,700 words]
“I’m afraid those are the two choices,” says the voice from social services.
Laura hangs-up and looks out of the kitchen window at the goats roaming over their smallholding.
“So, we do the foetal scans or we lose all child welfare,” says Adam. He continues, because that’s all he knows how to do. “And if they find anything in the scans, we still don’t get the child support if we keep it.”
Laura nods. “It’s not just the money,” she says, automatically, because they’ve had this conversation before. But she feels this is the type of conversation they should be repeating.
“Yeah, it’s the schools and healthcare too. But we wouldn’t want to send them to a state school anyway would we?”
“No,” she says.
“You’ll probably pass the test. You’re healthy, I’m healthy…”
“I’m 38 and you’re 42.”
“We’re keeping the baby regardless, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Don’t do the tests then.”
Laura’s phone rings. The caller ID shows it’s her sister, Michelle.
“Are you two talking again?” Adam asks.
“No.”
“Looks like you are now. I’ll leave you to it. There’s loads to do in the nursery.”
She answers the phone, “Hello.”
“Hello. Hello, Laura.”
“Hi Michelle. I can hear you, can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can hear you Laura, but why can’t I see you?”
“I don’t have holo installed at the farmhouse.”
“Why? I have something important to tell you, I need to see you.”
“Hold on, I can switch it to video on my phone.”
“I need to see you properly, in 3D.”
Laura sighs, “Well, I’ve got something to tell you too.” She touches her belly.
“Leanne is dead,” Michelle blurts out. “Are you still there?” She knows Laura is there because she can hear her breathing.
Laura has been out of contact with both of her sisters for years. She fell out with Michelle after arguing about inheritance. But drifted from Leanne, who went off the rails after their parents’ euthanasia.
“How and when?” Laura asks, eventually.
“I don’t know yet. But the police are involved.”
“OK.”
“It’s not our fault, Laura.”
“OK.”
Handling all the administration of death is more than a full time job. The days are difficult to swallow into memories as they become bloated with painful decisions. She forgets things that she has just arranged. She spends hours sharing commiserations with extended family but feels like she has barely traded a meaningful word with them.
Everyone faces grief alone.
The overwhelming administration becomes a convenient alibi for not taking the scans. Laura and Adam stop talking about it and quietly watch the bump grow.
Soon it’s time to handle Leanne’s estate and Laura has to go into the city to meet Michelle and the solicitor. She cannot believe that there is much to discuss. She was a party girl, out almost every night. Flitting between ropey boyfriends. Regular five star holidays. Only a part time retail job to support it. There is surely no estate to discuss, only debtors to inform of her death.
On the train to the city everyone is dressed approximately the same, but she can tell groups apart from their expressions. The commuters’ expressions are all wrong. You can see their focus changing from foreground to middleground. Their eyes twitch. They smirk at nothing. They’re logged in. The shoppers and the tourists are present. Looking out of the windows, enjoying the city growing around them, taking holo-selfies.
As soon as she steps into the station she realises she has forgotten to adjust the sensitivity of her augments. All the personal streaming drones swarming around the commuters are decorated with flashing red warning squares in her vision. She resets the augments, but not before involuntarily spasming into a defensive posture. Some of the drones surround her, trying to record her for ‘content’. Look at the technophone old-timer. They disperse when nothing else happens.
On the street the billboards around her change from a random rotation of adverts to targeted newborn baby products. Pictures of smart-cots and nanobot-formula-milk chase her up the street until she hides her IP address. She turns off everything except in-ear navigation.
Someone is dancing on the busy highstreet, their personal drone swooping and diving maniacally to keep them in frame. It’s pushed to the limit of its manoeuvrability and as Laura walks past it clips her bare shoulder. She almost apologises out of instinct but resists, channelling her awkwardness into an intense stare at the drone’s owner. She could be anything from 16 to 22 years old. It’s so hard to tell. Her face is coated in tattoos, but they could be skin wraps, they look so realistic now.
“I have to retake that whole sequence now,” she says, instead of apologising. She picks up the drone, checks it for damage and relaunches it.
Laura’s face feels hot and she is about to lash out when the drone drops out of the sky, hitting its owner. She hears the plastic crashes of other drones falling to the street. A voice in her ear tells her the in-ear navigation has reverted to offline mode. The LED advertising boards have frozen, some show an error message. Almost everyone on the street has stopped walking. They’re touching their temples, starting to panic.
Laura hears a little chuckle coming from a group of what she presumed were homeless men sitting around a lamppost. But she notices something is off. They’re scruffy but a bit too clean, a bit too present and awake. Their bags of possessions are carefully placed around the lamppost to hide something. They’ve hacked into the wireless router. One of them meets her gaze and winks.
The last time Laura needed a solicitor they still wore suits. The man across the table is stuffing a Bug-Mac into his face and is dressed painfully trendily. Ripped dress shirt, pearlescent hair colouring and the Rorschach style spectacles. The solicitor introduces himself and asks Laura to sit with Michelle on the other side of the desk. Michelle is dressed in a black blazer, black trousers and simple white blouse. She has removed all of her tattoos but kept the petrol green pearlescent hair. This is a performance of traditional grief.
“Are you pregnant?” asks Michelle
“I am,” says Laura.
“When were you going to tell me?”
“When I could get a word in edgeways. You haven’t asked me anything about my life these last two weeks.”
“Well, my sister has died, you know?”
“Yes, I am vaguely aware.”
“Ladies,” says the solicitor, revelling in the peacemaker role, “I know emotions are taut, but there is a lot to discuss. Laura, I understand from Michelle that you are not interested in your share of the estate. We have prepared the paperwork for you to forfeit your claim.”
“I’ve said nothing of the sort,” says Laura, looking at Michelle.
“You said you didn’t think there was anything to manage,” Michelle snaps.
“I did.”
“Well, sign the papers then if you don’t think there is anything.”
“So, you’re hiding something. What a surprise.”
“I’m hiding something? You’re the one who’s pregnant.”
“I can hardly hide that, Michelle. You just haven’t asked a single thing of me.”
“So am I to understand,” the solicitor asks, “that you are interested in the estate and you want to exercise your rights over the disposal of the intellectual property?”
“What intellectual property are you talking about?” Laura asks. Michelle sighs.
The solicitor spins around a monitor on his desk with flair and smile. It takes ten seconds for Laura to realise what she is looking at. It is Leanne’s account on a website that hosts user-made pornographic content. There are hundreds of uploads of Leanne performing, alone, with others, with many others, with devices. She notices there are tens-of-thousands of subscribers.
“Your sister was a reasonably successful adult performer,” the solicitor says. “These are the monthly earnings from her content.” The solicitor points to the figure on the screen. Laura realises it’s equivalent to the value of her farmhouse every six months.
“How long have you known about this?” Laura asks Michelle.
“Only since she died.”
“How much is the estate worth?”
The solicitor explains, “There are two houses, one of them is abroad. A third property, a penthouse in the city. Two luxury cars. Significant cash reserves. Various other financial assets listed here. Splitting up the assets in the estate is the easy bit. How to proceed with the intellectual property is trickier. You can close the account, but there are other options. Options that your sister wants to explore.”
“What options?”
“None of her fans know she has passed away yet,” the solicitor says. “They simply think she is on a vacation. It’s possible to set up a bespoke artificial intelligence model that will continue to create and post new content in her likeness as if she were still alive.”
“That can’t possibly work. People must be able to tell.”
“You’ll have to explain to her, she’s not very plugged in,” says Michelle.
“I see. Well, AI content is very convincing now. Almost 10% of the content on this site is already created by AI. This site has been going for decades. Many of the content creators are impossibly old or dead. How do you think they’re still posting? The initial estimate is that you could continue to generate 80% of the revenue for another five years before any serious questions are asked.”
“And you want to do this?” Laura asks Michelle.
“What difference does it make?”
“So the house, the cars, the money in the bank, it isn’t enough? You want to pimp our dead sister?”
“She obviously wasn’t against it.”
“Just because she wasn’t against doing it for her own benefit doesn’t mean she’d have wanted us to use this.”
“You’re such an atavist. I knew you would be like this. You didn’t even talk to her.”
“All the more reason why I shouldn’t sell her pornographic avatar without her permission.”
“What happens if we don’t agree?” asks Michelle.
“If nobody takes over the account, the standard terms and conditions of abandoned accounts apply. It will continue to make money for a few months. Then it will be archived. A few months later it will be permanently deleted.”
They don’t agree.
On the train home Laura places a hand on belly. Almost everyone on the train is zoned out. Logged in to whatever they’re engaging with. She touches her temple, scratches, trying to feel the implant, but she can’t.
She connects to the train’s internet, logs in and engages with some sweet content.
END
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Corporate Clarke's Fiction 