Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear

cool white to a smoldering yellow, and then cut out entirely.
    “Bugger,” Ferron said. “Power cut.”
    “How, in a block with a sunfarm?”
    “Loose connection?” she asked, rattling the door against the bolt just in case it had flipped back before the juice died. The cat protested. Gently, Ferron set the carrier down, out of the way. Then she kicked the door in frustration and jerked her foot back, cursing. Chappals, indeed.
    Indrapramit regarded her mildly. “You shouldn’t have re-upped.”
    She arched an eyebrow at him and put her foot down on the floor gingerly. The toes protested. “You suggesting I should modulate my stress response, Constable?”
    “As long as you’re adjusting your biochemistry . . . ”
    She sighed. “It’s not work,” she said. “It’s my mother. She’s gone Atavistic, and—”
    “Ah,” Indrapramit said. “Spending your inheritance on virtual life?”
    Ferron turned her face away. Worse, she texted. She’s not going to be able to pay her archiving fees.
    —Isn’t she on assistance? Shouldn’t the dole cover that?
    —Yeah, but she lives in A.R. She’s always been a gamer, but since Father died . . . it’s an addiction. She archives everything. And has since I was a child. We’re talking terabytes. Petabytes. Yottabytes. I don’t know. and she’s after me to “borrow” the money.
    “Ooof,” he said. “That’s a tough one.” Briefly, his hand brushed her arm: sympathy and human warmth.
    She leaned into it before she pulled away. She didn’t tell him that she’d been paying those bills for the past eighteen months, and it was getting to the point where she couldn’t support her mother’s habit any more. She knew what she had to do. She just didn’t know how to make herself do it.
    Her mother was her mother. She’d built everything about Ferron, from the DNA up. The programming to honor and obey ran deep. Duty. Felicity. Whatever you wanted to call it.
    In frustration, unable to find the words for what she needed to explain properly, she said, “I need to get one of those black market DNA patches and reprogram my overengineered genes away from filial devotion.”
    He laughed, as she had meant. “You can do that legally in Russia.”
    “Gee,” she said. “You’re a help. Hey, what if we—” Before she could finish her suggestion that they slip the lock, the lights glimmered on again and the door, finally registering her override, clicked.
    “There,” Indrapramit said. “Could have been worse.”
    “Miaow,” said the cat.
    “Don’t worry, Chairman,” Ferron answered. “I wasn’t going to forget you.”
    The street hummed: autorickshaws, glidecycles, bikes, pedestrials, and swarms of foot traffic. The babble of languages: Kannada, Hindi, English, Chinese, Japanese. Coffin’s aptblock was in one of the older parts of the New City. It was an American ghetto: most of the residents had come here for work, and spoke English as a primary—sometimes an only—language. In the absence of family to stay with, they had banded together. Coffin’s address had once been trendy and now, fifty years after its conversion, was fallen on—not hard times, exactly, but a period of more moderate means. The street still remembered better days. It was bulwarked on both sides by the shaggy green cubes of aptblocks, black suntrees growing through their centers, but what lined each avenue were the feathery cassia trees, their branches dripping pink, golden, and terra-cotta blossoms.
    Cassia , Ferron thought. A Greek word of uncertain antecedents, possibly related to the English word cassia, meaning Chinese or mainland cinnamon. But these trees were not spices; indeed, the black pods of the golden cassia were a potent medicine in Ayurvedic traditions, and those of the rose cassia had been used since ancient times as a purgative for horses.
    Ferron wiped sweat from her forehead again, and—speaking of horses— reined in the overly helpful commentary of her classical