In her triumphant, if dazed, march down Boylston Street, she passed the alphabetically-arranged cross streets—Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth—and paused at the public library, the nation’s oldest. Two heroic bronze sculptures—female figures representing art and science, one holding an artist’s palette, the other an orb—flanked the entrance to the building. She felt as invincible as the bronze heroines. What could stop her now?
Colleen reached her building. It was nestled in Copley Square, a hub of business, learning, and leisure. She sleeved past the security pillar and took an elevator to the eighteenth floor. The door recognized her and opened as she approached. She stopped in the entryway, kicked off her shoes, and stepped onto a thick pile rug. Today it displayed a traditional Moroccan design, an ivory background with brilliant blue diamonds. Colleen adored the soft cushion under her feet.
She was shaking with joy, ecstatic at the fulfillment of a dream. There was more work to do than she could imagine, but right now was a time for a quiet celebration. She had done it.
Colleen crossed her living room, picked up a crystal decanter from a sideboard, and poured two fingers of a Laphroaig Scotch Whisky. She swallowed the smoky liquid, letting the peaty Islay malt warm and relax her.
After a moment’s rest, Colleen went to the bathroom to wash her face. She noticed a smudge on her sleeve. No matter. She would activate the garment’s cleaning properties while she changed it from a business suit to something casual and comfortable.
Dr. Colleen Katy Lowell’s last living act was to subvocalize instructions to her datasleeve to refashion the garment. She chose culottes and a loose-fitting top for freedom of movement. She decided to let her sleeve pick the color from a palette that complemented her light brown hair and fair skin tones. The sleeve displayed a selection of reds and Colleen confirmed the choice. Perfect. Designer Bill Blass had said, “When in doubt, wear red.”
Colleen never tired of watching the fabric stretch and pull, reforming itself. She imagined that it was like a second skin, conforming to her figure and mood. She stood still as the jacket lost its pockets. The sleeves shortened and the jacket wove itself from an open front to a pullover. The legs had begun to pull up away from her ankles when her datasleeve processed a string of code that lay hidden in her sleeve’s memory.
The tightening across her chest was the first indication that something was wrong. Colleen subvocalized but the jacket continued to constrict. First it was uncomfortable, then painful. The jacket compressed her chest and pinned her arms, an anaconda on its prey. She couldn’t breathe. She stumbled into a wave of vertigo and collapsed. Pinpoints of light speckled her vision. She tried to call out—nothing but a hoarse whisper. Then, blackness. Her lifeless body lay cushioned on the soft pile of her treasured rug.
Four minutes later the garment relaxed and followed Colleen’s original instruction. It morphed into a loose top and culottes. Medical sensors, briefly deactivated, now triggered a distress beacon. The garment began rhythmic pulses, attempting CPR to revive the inert form. A recording of the event would show a spike in blood pressure followed by asphyxiation from a stress-induced myocardial infarction, a heart attack. It was understandable given her workload, a pity given her age.
The fatal databurst had travelled from satellite to satellite, from pillar to pillar, losing its pedigree. It would never be traced from the dataport on Eva Rozen’s Cerberus datapillar.
26
DEPARTURES
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
SUNDAY, MARCH 2, 2045
Colleen Katy Lowell was interred in a beautiful setting on a dreary day. The memorial service was held in Harvard College’s Holden Chapel, one of the oldest college buildings in America. The tiny edifice served as a house of worship in 1744. Later, it became part of the College’s medical school. The building’s diverse history mirrored Colleen’s eclectic talents.
Marta, Jim, and Dana sat in the front row of a small group of mourners. Colleen’s mother was a convalescent in a Minnesota nursing home. Her father had passed away and she had no brothers or sisters. A college friend, Rebecca Avery, two programmers from Colleen’s small company, and a scattering of others rounded out a scant assembly. Avery spoke briefly, and briefly cheered the mourners by describing Colleen’s wild streak as well as her brilliance. One of her design colleagues spoke of Colleen’s dedication to beauty. The other was mute with grief.
Jim helped Marta stand to address the assembly. Her skin was fever flushed, her pain obvious. “Colleen was different from anyone I know. I believe that everyone has seeds of anger and of grace—human weaknesses and God-given strengths. The way we balance these forces determines our good days and our bad days. Colleen had her faults but she was without guile. She was unpretentious—just look at how she mingled with corporate executives, runway models, and backroom maintenance staff. The years that she spent pursuing her dream testify to her confidence. She was my friend and I miss her terribly.”
Marta led the small assembly along a two-mile procession from the chapel to Mount Auburn Cemetery. They drove in silence. The funerary convoy would process past Cambridge Common, grey and muddy in the late winter gloom. The mourners would be escorted along Memorial Drive, a broad roadway that hugged the Charles River. Elm, linden, hawthorne, and lilac trees stood barren in the winter chill, rigid sentinels honoring Colleen’s passage.
Not one of the trees at the cemetery, nor the gardens, nor the ponds, nor the dells salved the bitter ache in Marta’s heart, neither did they soothe the fever that burned in her face. She summoned the last of her strength to stand alone over the yawning grave and to watch Colleen’s casket feed the hungry earth. When the coffin was in place, Marta took a lilac-hued aster to place on the coffin. Ancients believed that the perfume from an aster drove off evil spirits. “It’s too late for that now,” Marta said, and dropped the useless flower on Colleen’s casket and then turn to accept her husband’s arm and comfort.
It was unlikely that there was a more uncomfortable person anywhere in New England, perhaps the entire eastern seaboard, than the woman who stood behind Marta Cruz, waiting to speak with the grief-stricken scientist.
She was a bookkeeper at NMech with neither managerial authority nor seniority in the company, having joined the accounting staff only months earlier. She recognized Marta—Dr. Cruz—but had never spoken with her. She knew Colleen Lowell from news vids. She had met Eva Rozen once, and then managed to avoid the CEO. That was an easy task. Denise Warren was, after all, just a bookkeeper.
Her first disaster came two years ago when she uncovered something that Didn’t Fit—a scheme to inflate her employer’s sales figures.
So it was with understandable trepidation that Denise Warren approached Marta Cruz to offer condolences, and to bring her Jeremiah-like intuition to bear on an inexplicable series of entries in the NMech accounts receivable department. The funeral of Dr. Cruz’s friend was neither the time nor place to discuss a business matter, but the discrepancies had aroused her curiosity, which led to more discoveries. The irregularities would be a serious issue for the annual audit. But what prompted a now-hypothermic Denise Warren to linger at the funeral of a stranger was a bothersome detail that looked, well, criminal.
