QUERY:IMG\VFA\REF\HED.CAN
RETURN:TOKEN.UNKNOWN
Lena rubbed her eyes and took in the stillness of the street. The hot summer breeze rustled the weeds growing through the cracks in the pavement. Dogs barked off in the distance, staking claims over what was once a dense urban center. Off in the distance someone else dismantled the door to an apartment building; another scrapper looking for salvage. She should move soon to follow the shade.
Maybe she was just tired, it was getting a bit hard to focus. TOKEN.UNKNOWN. Nonsense, this was in her HeadCanon. How could it not be? A lot of junk passed through her hands crypto-archiving for KnowledgeBase but she was certain she’d had this locket before that.
She had a few other items on her rug that were decent POW; intact anachronisms with complete barcodes. And she could still dip into that box of dated polaroids if things were desperate. But the locket wasn’t just scrap to catalogue. She’d saved this for someone.
QUERY:VFA\HED.CAN – TOKEN.UNKNOWN
She closed the locket and tucked it back into her shirt.
Could it be her hardware? There’s no way she could save up for another implant now, not since the bottom fell out of KnowledgeBase. She scrolled through the logs, digging through the convoluted files for some indication of a known memory leak or patch she hadn’t opted into. It was a dry and fruitless hunt.
While she searched she packed up her salvage, rolled up her rug, and stowed the lot on the back of her ebike. The heat might be deadly but at least the solar was free and abundant.
The food trucks would all pull out of North Side after sunset. It was dangerous to be street level when the sun went down. The night belonged to the urban wildlife after all. But that left her reasonable enough time to cross town and trade for a burrito.
Back before the Uroboros blockchain took over, or the lunar colonies drew away the elites, even before the first edition HeadCanon implants were released, this city was a thriving social and economic hub. People came from all over the world to visit, watch live performances or dine at exclusive restaurants. Now it was little more than a ruin serving as a meager resource of uncatalogued information – pre-digital photographs, handwritten journals, even rare, unarchived software. Pieces of the old world waiting to be tokenized and commoditized if they could be properly identified.
The North Side park was as busy as the urban zone could get. A few trucks idled and traded food at current token values. Just over a dozen salvagers and other urbanites meandered around taking the opportunity for a hot meal that didn’t come from a can over a campfire. She chained up her bike, hefted her pack and approached a truck blazoned with an exuberant array of flaming foodstuffs.
“One number six, please”
“Not a problem, what are you trading in? UroPrime? Dreamcoin?”
“KnowledgeBase”
The vendor grunted. “I didn’t think anyone was actually still trading in KnowledgeBase.”
“Will you take it?”
“I can, but it’ll be a steep trade. Let me see…current rates put you at six thousand five hundred twenty-four and four tenths.”
Lena checked the wallet in her HeadCanon. Seven thousand. She might need to use the rest of those photos sooner than she thought.
“That’s fine, I can do it.”
The vendor held out a pad and she pressed her thumb to the little green panel. In seconds she received confirmation of the exchange as the transaction was added to the blockchain.
“One number six, coming right up.”
While she waited Lena opened her locket and tried again.
QUERY:IMG\VFA\REF\GLOBAL
RETURN:TOKEN.UNKNOWN
“What’s that you’ve got there?”
Lena looked up to see the vendor taking notice of her locket.
“Is that some new scrap? I don’t know how you folks can stand it digging through the ruins.”
“No, no, this is something else.”
“A family heirloom? My wife used to have one like that with a picture of her sister in it. Who do you keep in yours?
Lena looked down at the picture in the frame. “I’m not sure. I can’t remember where I picked it up, but it looks so familiar.”
“Can I see?” The vendor reached out his hand. Lena hesitated a moment but decided to let him look. He flipped open the hinge and squinted at the little picture inside.
“Well, this girl looks a lot like you. Could be your daughter?”
A sinking feeling passed through Lena’s stomach. Did she have a daughter?
The silence stretched out between them as Lena searched for the answer. Unease crept over the vendor as the moment lingered. He closed the heart-shaped locket and offered it back to Lena. “I ought to check on your food. Should be about ready.” Lena heard him as if from the end of a tunnel. Her knees felt ready to buckle and her head was spinning.
She couldn't be sure how much time passed there before she came to her senses. The vendor shifted his feet and looked away. He was still holding out the heart-shaped locket toward her. She snatched it from his hand and replaced it around her neck. The vendor went back to the grill in silence.
Lena took the burrito from him in a daze. If he said any words of parting, she took no notice.
QUERY:HED.CAN—FAMILY
RETURN:FATHER.CONNOR_ELMHURST
MOTHER.LEANORE_ELMHURST
DAUGHTER.UNREGISTERED
That couldn’t be right. Lena stumbled back to where she had parked her ebike and unlocked it by rote. She didn’t know where she was going, just that she needed to get away.
As she biked she ran the query again, and again. DAUGHTER.UNREGISTERED. But how could she be unregistered?
Lena had a few urban hideouts she could use. She made her way to the nearest to hunker down. She needed to think this through. She locked up her bike, hefted her pack and climbed the stairs of the abandoned tenement. There was a very comfortable loft on the upper floor that remained well furnished, even if it had been picked over for valuable anachronisms long ago. She wouldn’t be bothered there.
As she huddled on the plush if somewhat ragged couch, she took small mindless bites of her burrito. She flipped open her locket and studied the picture.
She searched for answers in her HeadCanon, but couldn’t find any record. She queried KnowledgeBase but identities could be unregistered for a variety of reasons ranging from a takedown request to just insufficiently logged data.
But how could she have forgotten? Lena had been scrapping for…how long? She checked the calendar in her HeadCanon but her calendar wasn’t updating. It couldn’t have been more than a few years could it?
It was getting late, and the fullness of her stomach after a long day was making her drowsy. She needed to hold onto this. Tomorrow, she’d find a way to sort it out, find her daughter, learn her name. Starting tomorrow.
SAVE_CURRENT_DAY:HED.CAN
RETURN:DUPLICATE.DETECTED\OVERWRITE:Y/N
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